Introduction: An Overview

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This introductory text offers a brief glimpse into the principal themes that will be developed in the different chapters of this book and is also intended to introduce the reader to the key issues at stake. First, it argues that far from limiting himself to an analysis of capitalism, particularly in Capital, Marx developed general concepts that therefore also apply to pre-capitalist modes of production, and that this economy is highly political in the sense that it already contains forms of power and ideology. Second, this book argues that it is the “direct production process” that lies at the heart of the various economic systems and, consequently, provides the keys to deciphering them, while the other economic processes (articulated around kinship, exchange etc.) serve only to reproduce it, and that the political “superstructure” plays a role only as a last resort. The third and more innovative theme sets the sphere of production against that of free time and consumption and social relations against inter-individual relations, introducing a complex dialectic between these two spheres. Finally, the last two themes question the meaning of history and suggest that it should be interpreted through the opposition between a negative and a positive dialectic.