Capital is a swelling current of value-in-motion that moves everything, influences every action, and informs every decision. But this is not only a capitalist world: there are other principles at work as we act and relate to one another, and even when we make and move things. As commonplace as these observations may be, they point to a problematic that we cannot afford to lose sight of: understanding capitalist dominance-amid-diversity is a necessary part of forming a critical view of the world, one that can begin to answer to the breadth of global entanglements and the scale of structural violence; comprehend how and why power is exercised; assess and plan for the probable outcomes of interventions; and, hopefully, contribute to fostering collective action adequate to our times.
Eric Wolf insisted on the importance of developing such a critical understanding of the world as “a manifold, a totality of interconnected processes” (2010: 3) shaped by the global deployment of “structural power” (1990: 586–587). His contribution to that effort was unique, based on decades of study of diverse forms of social organization and their trajectories of change over time. In Europe and the people without history (2010), Wolf deploys the results of this scholarship as a profoundly political, historical analysis of how our world was made through violent and exploitative interconnections. He urges us to transcend the ideologically imposed disciplinary divisions of social science by returning to the problematic of classical political economy, “the production and distribution of wealth within and between political entities and the classes composing them” (ibid.: 7–8), as developed by Marx into a “holistic human science” addressing the “different modes of production in human history” and the development of capitalism and the world market (ibid.: 21). In doing so, he lays the basis for a critical political economy centered on the mobilization and appropriation of capacities for creation and destruction and the accompanying transformations of relations among humans and to extra-human nature.
I use the terms making, taking, and relating to label three core themes of this critical political economy. Each term corresponds to a category of practice that Wolf emphasizes in defining his three “modes of production,” or patterned forms of mobilization and appropriation of “social labor”: capitalism, in which surplus appropriation is internalized in the production of commodities; the “tributary” mode, defined by its external, “political,” and rentier form of surplus extraction; and the “kin-ordered” mode, in which production and distribution are organized around multifaceted relationships and representations of relatedness. Labeling the core themes, I find, helps to clarify the contributions of Wolf's analysis. I will also suggest a fourth theme, “planning,” to further critical engagement with the politics of the economy.
Wolf is provocatively unclear about whether the kin-ordered and tributary modes he described still exist.1 They certainly aren't allowed much capacity to affect the future, which, he suggests, is being shaped by racialized and ethnicized proletarianization within a crisis-prone capitalism (2010: 379–383). This analysis, while vital, leaves out too many critical problematics and potentialities. It would probably not be useful to try to identify distinct modes of production in today's capitalist-dominated world, but a critical understanding of capitalism does require attention to the other logics and aspirations mobilizing and organizing our capacities for creation and care (Fraser 2022; Kalb 2016; Narotzky and Besnier 2014).2 Critical scholarship since Europe and the people has clarified how much capitalism depends on processes whose basic logics lie outside the pursuit of profit—like care of children, the reproduction of fish and forests, the constitution of legitimate authority—even as it tends to undermine them (Fraser 2022; Moore 2015). Wolf surely did not assimilate enough the feminist and ecological thought of his day, but it has since become impossible to imagine capitalism as total and self-sustaining; the question is how accumulation comes to predominate in a world with diverse institutions and logics. Indeed, overemphasizing the self-contained and totalizing logic of capital can performatively contribute to extending its dominance (Gibson-Graham 2006). Bringing Wolf's modes into the present helps to make visible the changing configuration of capitalism, and its limits.
Taking by making
Wolf defines the capitalist mode of production in terms of the employment of wage labor to produce a surplus, an excess over and above the workers’ own consumption (2010: 78–79)—an understanding grounded in the tradition of classical and Marxian political economy. Marx's analysis of this process, on which several key passages of Europe and the people draw, provides a sophisticated interpretation of how the production of commodities in exchange for wages intertwines the moment of production (making) with appropriation (taking) in ways that are both decisive and difficult to see. Wolf's understanding of that production process (and production in general) was marked by the materialism of his day, with a physicalist emphasis on the transformation of “nature” (e.g., ibid.: 73–75)—making in a quite literal sense. If this approach offers a limited understanding of the importance of services for capitalism, and of care and socialization for human beings, it usefully trains attention on the mobilization of manual labor as well as the indispensability of material extraction and destruction in profit making.3
Marx's analysis of capitalist production, in fact, helps to explain why capitalism marks a historical shift through its emphasis on producing; for the technological and organizational revolutions that enable more to be made more cheaply; for the sheer volume of stuff it generates; the frenetic pace of work, the extension of the working day; the reduction of turnover time so that more stuff can get to market sooner; planned obsolescence and disposable everything; the seemingly endless expansion of needs. Capital situates this obsessive dedication to making things in the employment of wage labor by capitals in competition with one another. The use of waged laborers to produce commodities provokes the pursuit of “relative surplus value”: in brief, the ability to produce more in less time grants a competitive edge, which means in turn that reinvestment and innovation are required to even maintain an existing market niche. This process is a mainspring of capital's growth imperative, its dynamism, voracity, and expansionism.4
Note that in this understanding of the capitalist mode of production, capitalists are involved in making—not laboring but organizing and innovating in the pursuit of relative surplus value. Henry Ford lays out his Dearborn assembly line, Elon Musk sleeps on the floor of his Fremont factory (or more disastrously, his office at Twitter). Between the organizing activity of capital and the contractual exchange of wages, the mechanisms of taking can become obscured by what Marx called the “social hieroglyphic” of capitalism's value form (1976: 167)—so much so that it takes a work of the weight of Capital to explain how even the most innovative and hardworking capitalists must appropriate a share of their workers’ labor time.
Certainly, this analysis captures fundamental aspects of capitalist production, and much of what makes capitalism historically particular. It helps to explain how that mode reproduces inequality and exploitation, its cyclical crises and secular pillaging of the planet, and its tragic and devastating combination of abundance and lack: even as 828 million suffer from hunger, “the mass of produced plastics alone is double the mass of all the terrestrial and marine animals, including the bodies of humans” (Schmelzer et al. 2022: 45).
One problem, however, is that capitalism as we know it is much more invested in taking without making than this picture suggests. If we begin instead with how the owners of money and property use those resources to make more money, we find a host of mechanisms besides the employment of wage labor to make things and provide services—appropriation of common or public resources, interest and bank fees, buying low and selling high, collecting rents, etc. With an eye to those processes, as well as the formative role of plantation slavery, other world systems’ scholars have defined capitalism in terms of investment for return rather than the employment of wage labor, although this threatens to obscure capitalism's distinct mode of producing and everything that follows from it.5 Still, the traders who profit from the fluctuations in petroleum futures are participating in an essentially capitalist activity, even if that activity is not (and could not) form the basis of a mode of production.
The relative importance of taking while making and taking without making has likely fluctuated throughout capitalist history (see Arrighi 2010). Capital was written during a “great surge of development” (Perez 2003) in which capitalism seemed to be all about making things (textiles, steel, ceramics, railroads). Europe and the people was written in the early 1980s, at the twilight of another surge, capitalism's postwar golden age, based on automobiles and all they brought in tow. But the decades since have brought us books like Profiting without producing (Lapavitsas 2013) and concepts like “accumulation by dispossession” (Harvey 2003)—both forms of capitalist taking whose most salient characteristic is the absence of the making that is supposed to characterize capitalism as a mode of production. Others reach for tributary concepts like “feudalism” to describe the present (Graeber 2018). A closer look at the tributary mode of production may, in fact, help to make sense of these developments.
Taking without making
While the capitalist mode of production is characterized by the organization of wage labor to maximize the share available for appropriation by the employer (as profits), Wolf's tributary mode is defined by a much greater social and procedural distance between taking and making, what are sometimes called “extra-economic” or “political” forms of surplus extraction. Indeed, the feudal lords and imperial states that dominated this mode from Kyoto to Tenochtitlán extracted their part of the produce of peasants and artisans without getting much involved in the production process (Wolf 2010: 79–80).6 It is in the end hardly a mode of production at all, and the values and self-representation of tributary social formations emphasized things like glory, honor, duty, valor, piety, and generosity rather than productivity. The focus on tribute allowed Wolf to make a broad distinction between capitalism and the state societies of 1400 CE, and to isolate some of the key processes that characterized them, including the tensions between centralization and decentralization among tribute takers and the mercantile push for luxury goods and specie.
I would suggest, however, that we can do rather more with the category of tribute taking. Abstracting from the specific situation of peasants paying tribute to their overlords, we can ask about other kinds of appropriation at a distance from production. Our more-than-capitalist world is full of “tributary” relationships in which the use (or threat) of violence, authority (legitimate or not), and property ownership are used to appropriate surplus, outside (or alongside) the employment of wage labor in the production of commodities. Such forms of appropriation, commonly described as “rent” or “rent-seeking,” have particular social, cultural, and political consequences. Many forms of rent and tribute are older than capitalism, and some of them will probably outlast it. Even if rent and tribute have become largely secondary to the dynamics of capitalist commodity production (see, e.g., Harvey 2007), they provide influential and sometimes predominant logics in many contexts. Moreover, the relative importance of surplus value production and rentierism has varied over time and space, an important facet of capitalism's uneven history and geography (Arrighi 2010; Coronil 1997; Lapavitsas 2013; Piketty 2014; Rayner 2020).
Rents on land and natural resources can be viewed through a tributary lens. Land rent was, in fact, one of the principal forms of surplus appropriation in the tributary mode, and the connection between “feudal” and “capitalist” rent is often direct and genealogical, as in the massive amount of rent collected by the British royal family and hereditary aristocracy (Meek 2014), or the inheritors of colonial latifundios in the Americas.7 Valuable natural resources and sources of ground rent have also tended to be monopolized by those with control over the means of violence, from the tradition of royal control of mines to the imperialist politics of oil, rubber, and bananas (see e.g., León Araya 2023).
Of course, the “art of rent” is distinct when the capitalist mode predominates, given how investment (past, current, and expected) shapes rents. “Rentierism” and “extractivism” have dynamics distinct from the industrial production of commodities. These include strategies to raise rents on urban land (gentrification, entrepreneurial urbanism) as well as the extraction of ground rents through mining or agriculture. The extensive entailments of the latter have been variously understood in terms of the “persistence of feudalism,” “resource curses,” the “development of underdevelopment,” and “rentier” and “magical” states. More recent scholarship has highlighted the ecological and gendered dimensions of “extractivism,” including the devastation of “sacrifice zones,” as well as the articulation with the capitalist mode of production of commodities, which depends on “cheap nature” (Moore 2015) and “ecologically unequal exchange” between North and South (Dorninger et al. 2021).
Rent is not only taken on the earth, however. There are many other ways of profiting alongside the production of commodities and services, including debt farming, financial intermediation, and a dizzying array of market manipulations. Some of these, such as the creation of legal monopolies through intellectual property laws, subsidies, or profits off of public indebtedness, have a particularly clear relationship to state powers, while others emerge through the many forms of intermediation and deception allowed by a complex, ever-changing, and profoundly unequal world market. The increased prevalence of such forms of profit seeking, associated with the term “financialization,” has enormous consequences for economy, polity, and society (Mattioli 2020). Understanding and evaluating profiting without producing requires taking up the classical political-economic distinction between making and taking value, which has been blurred by the spread of neoclassical economics’ subjectivist equation of value and price (Mazzucato 2018b).
Other forms of extraction would be more conventionally described as tribute. Extortion of “protection money,” a classic tributary practice, is an increasingly important mode of surplus extraction in much of Latin America. Research in Sicily and India has documented how such protection rackets can become intertwined with capital and the state to increase surplus extraction (Sanchez 2015; Schneider and Schneider 2003). Some have also seen an analogue to the classical tributary relationship—a contemporary tale of Rome and the Gauls—in the US dollar's status as a global reserve currency, insofar as it depends on military force and, by allowing for an enormous current account deficit, sustains a bloated financial sector and excess consumption through public and private indebtedness.
States of course take massively through taxes, mineral rights, and other means. And, like tribute takers, taxers are not usually directly involved in organizing the production of the surplus that they appropriate, although Wolf defines taxes in a capitalist context as “indirect surplus value” in recognition of the generally dominant form of surplus production, and the complex and contested effects of the circulation of revenue (2010: 309). Indeed, while tribute emphasizes upward distribution, modern states do a lot of horizontal—and some downward—redistribution, socializing risk and providing public goods and services that are often decommodified, processes with diverse and wide-ranging consequences (Mugler et al. 2024). The diverse roles of contemporary states as producers, service providers, and economic organizers implies distinct kinds of relations and questions, a problematic that I will return to in my consideration of “planning” below. The possibility of a more tributary relation of surplus extraction always remains, and the Right in particular often promotes a tributary imaginary of states as regimes of taking that support unproductive bureaucrats, politically connected elites, and “undeserving” recipients of social welfare. As much as these narratives distort the social production and appropriation of surplus, state agents, working with private capital and organized crime, do often use state power to appropriate additional surplus (Sanchez 2015; Schneider and Schneider 2003). The recurrence in recent decades of massive, tax-financed “bailouts” and increasing use of subsidies has given new prominence to the use of the state's tributary powers in appropriating and mobilizing surplus for capital, which may represent an emergent regime of “political capitalism” (Riley and Brenner 2022).
Finally, another, increasingly important aspect of “taking” is the appropriation of data, including the commercialization of the “behavioral surplus” created by “prosumers” and workers and the harvesting and repackaging of the communication, knowledge, and intellectual labor by the purveyors of “generative artificial intelligence.” The centrality of managed relationships to this form of accumulation, however, demands other kinds of concepts, which we will explore in the following section.
Relating
Wolf's third, “kin-ordered” mode of production is defined by the mobilization and appropriation of “social labor” through a kind of relationship, glossed as “kinship.” He avoids an overly essentialist definition of what that kinship is, while also giving a central role to biological reproduction: the two fundamental sources of power in the mode are “control over the reproductive powers of women, and parentage” (2010: 93), while the work and spatial requirements of hunting, gathering, cultivating, and herding define the stakes on which this power is exercised. This results in some characteristic contradictions: inequality between men and women, elders and juniors, central and peripheral lines of descent, original members and newcomers, insiders and outsiders (ibid.: 92–95, 389). He further argues, however, that even as the logic of kinship fosters such inequalities, they are also self-limiting; there is a limit to the amount of labor and resources that can be mobilized and concentrated through kin relations (ibid.). The formation of classes requires the “breakthrough” emergence of a class of tribute takers, which will also tend to assert its lack of kinship with the tribute payers, whether as victorious conquerors, blue-blooded aristocrats, or descendants of the gods. The rupture of kinship bonds in fact figures as a kind of original ideological move in Wolf's history: class, ethnic, and racial domination that is grounded materially in surplus appropriation and violence is always symbolically buttressed by essentializing notions of differential origins and descent (ibid.).
These observations point to how “kin-ordering” can be productive to think with, beyond Wolf's “mode.” As a “mode of production,” in fact, it has many limits. To begin with, kinship is as universal as it gets, so, even as kinship is a significant feature of all modes, the kin-ordered mode groups together a great diversity of societies, about which it is difficult to make meaningful generalizations, resulting in something of a residual category (Asad 1987)—indeed, kin-ordered is offered by Wolf as a substitute for that other catch-all, “primitive” (2010: 88; “egalitarian” or “stateless” would be the favored terms now).
Nevertheless, “kin-ordering” as a concept usefully points us to the political economy of relating, broadly conceived. This includes the kind of dense, multifaceted relationships that resist reduction to one purpose and that often involve open-ended obligations and commitments. The family or household is an archetype for such relationships, and a basis from which wider structures of obligation, identification, and authority are constructed practically and imagined, even as household relations are in turn shaped by the culturally prevalent understandings of relatedness, life cycle, and gender, as well as the political economy of provisioning. But the household is not the only way of relating self to the world, forming open-ended relationships, and drawing lines of affinity, solidarity, and obligation—there are also workplaces, schools, unions, associations, Discord servers, nation-states, and species. Some of these modes of relating are called kinship, others usually are not; kin-ordering draws attention to the production of relatedness as an active process, and its worldly consequences.
Capitalism is also dependent on activities of reproduction and care, organized largely through kinship and differentiated by gender, distinguished from the so-called productive economy. This is an unstable and contradictory relationship, in which capitalism tends to undermine the provision of care that it needs (Fraser 2022; Weiss 2023). The institutional distinction between home-based, private reproductive work and public, remunerated, productive labor allows capital to appropriate care work as an uncompensated subsidy, just as it exploits soils, forests, and fisheries (Moore 2015). This is possible because “kin-ordering” implies principles other than monetized, contractual, and wage relations that prevail in the capitalist mode.
Kinship also continues as a predominant mode of organizing family and peasant farms, artisan workshops, and the provision of petty commerce and services. These are articulated with capitalism in many ways—as suppliers, consumers, debtors, and providers of low-cost labor—but are often precarious in a capitalist-dominated world market. The defense of kin-ordered peasant production has been a major source of resistance to the institutions of capitalist dominance, whether national states or the WTO (Edelman 2005; Wolf 1969).
But the capitalist mode itself also works through kinship and other long-term, open-ended relationships—even if capital's demand for flexibility always portends their dissolution. Family relationships and other kinds of personal connections (alumni associations, golf clubs, etc.)—Bourdieu's social capital—help to form bourgeois alliances and maintain the distribution of property across generations. The role of relations is dynamic and changing: Anna Tsing (2013) argues that the need to manage relationships in “supply-chain capitalism” has encouraged the resurgence of gift economies. (In fact, an emphasis on gifts can probably be taken as a general index of the importance of open-ended relationships of obligation, which is why “kin-ordered” and “gift” economies are often overlapping categories.)
Kin-ordering also usefully points to the importance of relations and identities in processes of production and distribution. Households mobilize and discipline proletarian labor in gendered ways (Kalb 2016). Capitalist labor markets are famously segmented by race, ethnicity, gender, and citizenship (Wolf 2010: 379–383), as are the conditions of access to other kinds of resources, notably of the modern welfare state—Norwegian passport holders have access to a material system of distribution that the rest of us do not. Notably, such national systems of distribution are made meaningful through idioms or imaginaries of kinship—common descent, blood, habitation. Such abstract and large-scale kin relations are not new, however: expansive systems of solidarity based in kinship seem to have characterized many foraging societies (Graeber and Wengrow 2022).
Capitalism and the modern state have both mobilized and truncated relatedness in processes of racial and national formation and colonial domination, exploitation, and extraction. The Marxian critique of alienation has highlighted how capitalism encourages a thin and unfulfilling sense of being in relation to the world, through the proliferation of one-dimensional, instrumental, contractual relations; the subordination of creative capacities and collective purpose to capitalist management and the dictates of prices and profits. This parallels how intimate or thick relations with land or animals have also been disparaged as superstitious and sentimental in the process of freeing resources for extraction (Schneider 1991).
Capital has also begun to mobilize and harness relatedness in new ways. “Prosumers” using Google and workers for companies like Uber produce data more important for profits than the services delivered (Doorn and Badger 2020; Fuchs 2015). Even storied industrial firms, like those of the auto industry, are banking on establishing relationships with their consumer base (as Tesla has done) and selling “automobility as a service.” Intimate relations become the object and means of capitalist accumulation, transforming them in ways still unknown.
Relatedness, after all, is central to the question of where and how we draw lines between ourselves and the rest of the world; kin, compatriots, fellow humans, and others. While racialized and ethnicized claims of consanguinity and affinity are a major source of inequality, exploitation, and structural violence, movements with transformative aspirations have often sought to expand solidarity by advocating wider concepts of relatedness; insisting on the brotherhood/sisterhood of man/woman/the nation, or the common condition of the workers of the world (see, e.g., Lazar 2017). Contemporary “ontological” critique also points to how some ways of arranging the division between humans and other beings may facilitate the violence of extractive economies (De la Cadena 2010; Haraway 2016). An important strain of critical thought argues accordingly that expanding relatedness even more broadly—beyond the human—is central to addressing our multiplying environmental crises (e.g., Haraway 2016). Importantly, such ontological critique has been inspired by dialogues with Indigenous peoples for whom “relationality”—both kin-making and relating to the extra-human world—is central to the conduct of life (Tynan 2021). A renewed kinship mode, in which creative capacities are deployed in consideration of the relations they foster, would, however, require a major material reordering: capitalism's growth imperative is incompatible with belonging, responsibility, or commitment to anything but a select few (and mostly well-moneyed) creatures.
Planning
Europe and the people without history does not address the avowedly socialist political economy spanning Eurasia at the time of its publication.8 This is a notable absence, not least because such economic planning implied distinct logics of mobilizing and appropriating labor and resources that are not easily contained by Wolf's capitalist, tributary, or kin-ordered modes (even while concepts from each can be productively applied to it; see, e.g., Cucu 2019). More importantly for our purposes, more than a century of charged debate on planning points to a central problematic for a critical political economy and ecology: the status and consequences of the purposeful (as opposed to spontaneous) allocation and administration of human labor and resources.
Like making, taking, and relating, planning helps us to draw lessons from past and present political-economic diversity and to recognize aspects of our current, capitalist-dominated world that we might not see otherwise. Planning, too, is part of every political economy, even if it takes very different forms and occupies different degrees of material and symbolic centrality. Allocating labor and resources means imagining, assessing, responding to, and shaping futures. Planning is therefore an essential part of world making, part and parcel of the practice of power, both as “power over” and “power to”; a means of domination and a collective response to shared problems, or both at once. Attention to planning also renders visible forms of economic governance and organization obscured by an ideological emphasis on the power of spontaneous market coordination, and it highlights political problems that are increasingly urgent for us today, including decision-making about technological development, collective investment, and our relations to the planet.
Although the word “planning” appears only twice in Europe and the people, both mentions are suggestive. Arguing that a conventional evolutionary understanding of chiefs as “acting on behalf of a social whole in coordinating specialized activities, planning and supervising public works, managing redistribution, and leading in war” misses the key question of whether “social labor is deployed” through kinship or by an emerging class of tribute takers (Wolf 2010: 96–97). Planning, in other words, must be understood in terms of how power is used to mobilize and appropriate human creative capacities (see also Cucu 2019).
This is a vital point that is central to Wolf's critical project. Such coordination, planning, supervision, and managed redistribution, however, are significant processes in their own right that raise important questions. Almost in passing, Wolf refers to “the modes of planning that marked . . . Andean polities,” including “food distribution from state-managed storehouses on a territorial basis” (2010: 60). In fact, this “mode of planning,” as implemented by the Incas in particular, was not limited to the distribution of goods across an enormous empire but also included various categories of collective and state-directed labor organized at different scales and degrees of centralization. It is worth emphasizing that such planned and directed labor is distinct, in principal and in practice, from the extraction of tribute from “primary producers” in control of their land, tools, and labor—which is, of course, how Wolf characterizes the tributary mode.9 Such planned allocation of labor and resources had major economic, political, social, ecological, and demographic consequences, including many that were unplanned, as subject populations reacted to Inca rule (Garrido and Salazar 2017)—phenomena that also characterized socialist planning (Creed 1998; Cucu 2019). Incan planning in fact built on a millennial history of varied forms of collective labor, many of which were significantly more egalitarian, including some that built large-scale public works (Patterson 1991; Vega-Centeno 2007).10
Radical thinkers, including Marx, were once very interested in these precolonial Andean political economies.11 Replacing private property and markets with collective ownership and planning became central to the socialist project. Understandings of what that meant has varied enormously, but a common theme has been that planning should permit a deliberate allocation of time and resources to collectively serve legitimate human needs, in contrast to the lopsided power and priorities fostered by the capitalist market—a distinction that has increasingly come to be understood in ecological as well as distributional terms (Saito 2023).
In practice, authoritarian party states used planning to mobilize and appropriate labor and resources to accumulate heavy industry and military power (Cucu 2019). The vast system of planned allocation also involved distinct processes and contradictions (hoarding, plan bargaining, “informality”), with characteristic forms of making, taking, and relating (Cherkaev 2023; Cucu 2019; Verdery 1996). At the same time, planning was strongly influenced by commercial and financial relationships with the capitalist world market and relied on and encouraged other kinds of markets, especially for labor (Burawoy and Lukács 1992; Lampland 1995).
At the same time, while capitalism is represented as a market system, it in fact depends on the vast and complex systems of nonmarket allocation within capitalist firms (Burawoy and Lukács 1992; Phillips and Rozworski 2019). Planning and logistical techniques, such as linear programming, circulated between socialist states and capitalist firms who were confronting many of the same logistical and administrative problems, while capitalist firms including Walmart and Amazon have spent the decades since the fall of socialism improving capacities for non-market allocation on a vast scale (Phillips and Rozworski 2019).
Capitalism idealizes a decentralized, competitive form of planning, in which investors commit resources to foster innovative technologies and products. Marx's most well-known critique of this process, on which Wolf draws, centers on how the drive to increase relative surplus value leads to overaccumulation, crises, and a growing mismatch between the capacity and will to address our real needs. The further critical analysis of investment by Marxists and others has revealed other limits and dangers: how the pursuit of profitability distorts technological development (e.g., Dearden 2023; Greenfield 2017; Marx 2022); and the speculative, fictitious, and contingent aspects of capital formation and investment (e.g., Bear 2020; Harvey 2007; Ho 2009). At the same time, the regularity of bailouts and the rise of algorithmic and index funds are transforming investment; more interestingly, when combined with advances in logistics, computation, and artificial intelligence in production and distribution, a regime of planning may be emerging even more distant from the entrepreneurial system of liberal imaginary, with interesting similarities to stillborn projects for cybernetic planning in the USSR and Chile (Phillips and Rozworski 2019).
Capitalist states also plan. They allocate resources on a massive scale (59 percent of GDP in France and 45 percent in the USA, according to the OECD), while employing a diverse array of governmental techniques (incentives, regulations, interest rates) to encourage, and sometimes channel, “productivity” (including through the planned insecurity of unemployment). While the state largely features in EPWH as an agent of violent taking—a war-maker, conquerer, and enslaver (and rightly so)—Wolf also points towards a more active role in economic governance, as in his discussions of how the British state and its empire encouraged primitive accumulation and industrialization (e.g., idem, 121-2, 260-1), as well as the need for emergent capitalists to create national state institutions (such as central banking and public education) to support accumulation, beginning a process of state expansion, which, he notes, increased greatly in the early 20th century, providing a new terrain of class struggle (idem, 309). Scholarship since EPWH has uncovered the central role of states in stimulating, guiding, and directing capitalist development over the past century, through industrial policy, planning, and technological development (including the principal technologies of the iPhone, Mazzucato 2018a). Research on the developmental state has explored the relationships between the development and outcomes of economic planning and elite strategies of accumulation by both making and taking (Amsden 2001; Chibber 2003; Coronil 1997; Mazzucato 2018a, 2018b).
State planning, like the state itself, is a field of struggle (Jessop 2007). Accumulation predominates, although the accumulation projects that dominate the state are not always about making surplus value—elite taking is not always aligned with capitalist development. Other interests and considerations besides accumulation also enter into states’ plans, even as they are subordinated to elites’ making and taking strategies. State planning in China, Europe, and the United States today serves geopolitical ends such as control of technologies and supply chains, as carbon reduction, even as the capitalist imperative to accumulate by making, and a narrow focus on carbon has prevailed over any possibility of ecological sustainability (Rayner 2023).
Within this more global picture of the role of the state are the particular institutions mobilizing human capacities and directing resources towards specific ends. One of the foremost of these is, of course, war, as Wolf consistently emphasized. Today the militaries of India, China, and the USA are the world's largest employers; organizations that have developed enormous capacities for planning and non-market resource administration and logistics (Phillips and Rozworski 2019), which is also employed to guide technological development and support the accumulation of capital (Mazzucato 2018a; Wolf 2010: 309). State institutions also organize labor and resources to other ends, including providing goods and services. Sometimes this is also on a massive scale, as in the case of the UK's National Health Service (NHS) or the Indian Railways. Decision-making in most state institutions is profoundly hierarchical, but municipalities, neighborhoods, and communities also sometimes use more democratic forms of planning to create infrastructure and services and to administer land and resources. Recent decades have seen some innovations in democratic planning, such as the participatory budgeting developed in Porto Alegre, Brazil, as well as efforts to learn from the many forms of collective decision-making in the management of common resources (Ostrom 2010).
Capitalism relies on commitments and care beyond the profit motive for the reproduction of the social and natural systems on which it depends, even as it always threatens to consume them (Fraser 2022), whether through direct appropriation (taking) or through the subordination of collective purposes to the logic of surplus value production (supporting “competitiveness” and “business friendliness”). Nonmarket allocation is, of course, subject to its own “internal” problems of information, bureaucratization, hierarchy, inequality, and private appropriation, now deeply woven into contemporary common sense.
Despite everything, including the neoliberal emphasis on marketization and competition, people continue to commit to working with others for the common good (Muehlebach 2012). They defend and promote institutions that permit collective action, planning, and resource allocation with some autonomy from capitalist market logics. During my fieldwork in Costa Rica between 2006 and 2009, the defense of the publicly owned Costa Rican Electricity Institute's (ICE) monopolies in electricity and telecommunications had recently provoked a major protest wave and was central to opposition to a Free Trade Agreement with the United States (Rayner 2014). Concerns about the private appropriation of national wealth, rate increases for basic services, and the loss of public control over major planning decisions, especially hydroelectric construction, made the proposed transformation of the ICE emblematic of the displacement of welfare logic of the “social state” by the logic of private accumulation.
During my research in Ecuador between 2015 and 2022, the Indigenous movement and their supporters in Quito were committed to promoting the comunas (communes) and their assembly-based democratic planning, which governs land use and conservation as well as coordinating collective work and action (Rayner 2021). The latter includes mingas, a Kichwa term used for various forms of collective labor since at least the Inca Empire, which today usually means “planned work for the benefit of the community” (in the words of a comunera cited in Faas 2023). The construction and maintenance of roads, irrigation ditches, and other infrastructure is an exercise of the capacity for collective action, which is also directed toward other ends, including politics. Collective action in national and local politics, including demands for recognition of communal territory, property, and authority, has, in turn, mobilized and amplified capacities for democratic planning, including the formal state recognition of communal land-use plans and a variety of communal initiatives from daycare centers to reforestation with native plants.
The defense of the capacity to plan according to logics other than those that serve the accumulation of capital is one important response to the dominance of the capitalist world market demonstrated by Wolf—and is almost certainly the kind of response with the most transformative potential. Today we are confronted with the urgent question of how democratic projects can rearticulate forms and possibilities of planning in the context of technological change, deglobalization, rising authoritarianism, and the collective challenges of quickening planetary disasters.
Conclusion
In Europe and the people without history, Wolf challenged us to develop a critical account of how our world was made through globe-spanning processes of exploitation. In doing so, he also advanced a model for thinking systemically and systematically about both the diversity of forms of economic organization and the dominant role assumed by capitalist accumulation, centered on the interactions between three modes of production. I have argued that the principles that Wolf identifies as central to those modes of production—the creation of surplus value through wage labor, tribute taking, and kinship—can be usefully employed to develop a critical understanding of unevenness, diversity, and change in our contemporary capitalist world. A focus on making, taking, and relating helps us to raise critical questions about how our capacities for creation and destruction are mobilized and channeled, to whose harm and whose benefit. To this triad, I add a fourth problematic, planning, which complements Wolf's framework by highlighting other aspects of power and of politics that are essential to understanding and confronting the challenges of our times.
The aim is not to treat these problematics in isolation—as Wolf emphasized, such disaggregation is a characteristic ideological move of bourgeois social science (2010: 1–19); on the contrary, the point is to selectively highlight critical points of entry into the analysis of complex realities that are both historically specific and also always interconnected. Europe and the people provides a model for how to do so, as Wolf used his anthropologically informed understanding of the varied forms of making, taking, and relating to present histories of trade and plunder that pointed toward their ramifications for the making of our world. Today we might follow his lead by asking how different orders of accumulation—extractivism, rentierism, political and surveillance capitalism—mobilize labor and violence, administer and allocate resources, and transform our relations to one another and the nonhuman world, within an uneven geography shaped by different but interconnected historical trajectories. Taking the mode of production as a critical approach, we can try to use the history we have had to inform a future worth having.
Notes
At one point Wolf suggests that the kin-ordered and tributary modes continue as adjuncts of capitalism (2010: 352–353); at another, he refers to them as having persisted in a few remote places “through the nineteenth century and even into the twentieth” (ibid.: 306). In yet another, he describes how, during the nineteenth century, capitalism “enveloped and penetrated other modes, setting up capitalist enclaves with differently organized hinterlands” (ibid.: 296). I think this uncertainty reflects ambiguities in how “mode” is understood in relation to territory as well as the meaning of predominance.
As Wolf points out (2010: 75), Marx and Engels used “mode of production” flexibly, including “agricultural,” “petty commodity,” and “Slavic” modes. Returning to such a messy and plural use of the term might help compare political economies and relativize capitalism (Roseberry 1989; see also Graeber 2006), but its history makes this difficult.
Like other twentieth-century materialist anthropologies, Wolf centers making as the essence of human being (2010: 20)—the “key” that he takes from capitalism to the understanding of the other modes of production (ibid.: 77). But the key doesn't always fit—the priority of making things is particular to capitalism, as Wolf implicitly recognized when he emphasized other kinds of practices in defining the tributary and kin-ordered modes. It is worth noting that Marx considered wage labor employed in service provision to be directly productive of surplus value, although he emphasized industry.
Shaikh provides a comprehensive recent version (2016). Accelerating the turnover time of capital, including planned obsolescence and disposability, and avoiding competition by creating new needs also drive growth. Moore (2015) adds the mobilization of powers of nature to the competition for relative surplus value.
I avoid the term “free” wage labor as ideological. Wage labor and slavery share key characteristics for capital: they are severable, allowing capital to be adaptable, and they permit capitalists to organize production (see Mintz 1986; Graeber 2006).
This involvement is a matter of degrees (see Asad 1987). Tribute can shade into something more like capitalism or planning when there is a more active management of production by the tribute taker.
Land rents and inheritance have been a longstanding source of tension in a liberal tradition that prioritizes the production of value.
There is one mention of debates over a “socialist mode of production” in the bibliographic notes (Wolf 2010: 401).
Such directed (“corvee”) labor has existed to varying degrees in other “tributary” polities. Wolf gives several examples.
Patterson (1991) argues for a “communal mode of production” that came to be dominated by the tributary mode of the Incas. Vega-Centeno (2007) at Cerro Lampay in Peru finds evidence of piecemeal construction of monumental architecture through intermittent work brigadesfollowed by feasts—a familiar form in the Andes today.
For Marx, see, for example 1973: 36, 400, 414, 752.
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