Tracing surplus in the history of anthropological thought

p. 362, Marxist Approaches in Anthropology, Annual Review of Anthropology 1975.

"Most of Marx's analysis of relations of production dealt with class societies. He showed that the dynamics of class 'were rooted in the appropriation of surplus-labor-as either living or embodied labor-by a class of non-producers:

The essential difference between the various economic forms of society, between, for instance, a society based on slave-labour, and one based on wage-labour, lies only in the mode in which this surplus-labour is in each case extracted from the actual producer, the labourer (39, p. 217).

Following the work of Balibar (4), a number of Marxist anthropologists, such as Terray (56)and Rey (49), picked up on this citation from Marx and applied it to their analysis of precapitalist societies. They argued that Engels' tendency to define class in terms of a property relation-ownership of the means of production-
is a distortion of the essential determination of class, i.e. the exploitation of the producer by the nonproducer. Rey specifically tried to show that in the "lineage mode of production" in Africa surplus-labor is extracted by elders from dependent junior men.

Rey's emphasis on the category of surplus-labor has been analytically fruitful for anthropologists since it centers attention on the dialectical determination of surplus in a Marxist framework. Whereas cultural materialists and the classical political economists insist that surplus is defined uniquely by technological parameters (productivity and the minimum subsistence requirements necessary for the biological reproduction of labor), Marx, in his analysis of capitalism, argued that the subsistence bundle of workers is socially, not biologically, determined. Both its composition and its size vary with the use-values that workers demand, and can therefore express the outcome of workers' struggle for a larger share of their own surplus product."