Modes of Production: Capitalism and Pre-Capitalist Integration in Third World Development

In many developing economies, you can find a software park humming with venture-backed startups just a few kilometres from villages where land is tilled much as it was a century ago. Mainstream economics treats this as a temporary lag, a sign that “modernisation” simply hasn’t reached everyone yet. Marxist scholars in the late 1960s offered a sharper answer. They argued that this coexistence is not an accident or a delay, but a structured relationship in which advanced capitalism actively depends on, and reshapes, the older economic forms around it. This is the core insight of the articulation of modes of production approach, one of the most influential attempts to explain why capitalism in the developing world looks so different from capitalism in Europe or North America.

What is a mode of production?
The problem with a simple stage theory
Social formation versus mode of production
Why this distinction matters
The meaning of articulation
Three interlinked practices
Capitalism in the periphery versus the core
Why capitalism stays “incomplete”
The Indian mode of production debate
The colonial imprint
Strengths and criticisms
Why it still matters

What is a mode of production?

To understand articulation, you first need the building block: the mode of production. In Marxist theory, a mode of production refers to the specific way a society organises the production of its means of subsistence. Karl Marx used the concept both to analyse the economic base of a society and to describe its overall structure.

Every mode of production has two components. The first is the forces of production, which include human labour power and the means of production such as tools, machinery, land, and technical knowledge. The second is the relations of production, which cover the property and power relations that govern who owns the means of production and how surplus is extracted from the people who actually do the work. Marx analysed each mode of production by looking at the specific economic form in which the owners of the means of production extracted unpaid surplus labour from the direct producers.

Marxist theory identifies several historical modes of production, including primitive communism, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and others. Capitalism is defined by wage labour and the drive to accumulate profit. The conventional Marxist story treated these as broadly successive stages, with one mode replacing another over time.

The problem with a simple stage theory

Here is where the theory ran into trouble. If history moves cleanly from feudalism to capitalism, why did colonised regions in Asia, Africa, and Latin America fail to follow the European path? Why did they end up with industrial enclaves surrounded by vast non-capitalist countrysides instead of the relatively uniform capitalism seen in core countries? A theory built on neat, universal stages could not explain a world where multiple modes of production existed side by side, sometimes for generations. This is the puzzle the articulation approach set out to solve.

The single most important conceptual move in this approach is the distinction between a mode of production and a social formation. These terms sound similar, but treating them as different things is what unlocks the entire theory.

A mode of production is an abstract concept. It describes a pure economic logic, such as the logic of capitalism or the logic of feudalism, considered in isolation. A social formation, by contrast, is a concrete, real, historically specific society. The term was popularised by the structuralist Marxist Louis Althusser as a substitute for the word “society,” which he felt was too tied to humanist ideas of social life as the product of individual people. For Althusser, focusing on the social formation meant focusing on structural relations rather than individual actors.

The crucial point is this: any real social formation almost never contains just one pure mode of production. Instead, it contains a combination of several. A social formation is best understood as the concrete, historical articulation between the capitalist mode of production, persisting pre-capitalist modes of production, and the wider institutional context. One mode is usually dominant, but the others do not simply vanish. They persist, interact, and shape one another.

Why this distinction matters

Writing in 1980, the historian Perry Anderson observed that the distinction between mode of production and social formation had by then passed into general usage among Marxists, and that it was Althusser and his colleagues in Reading Capital (1965) who effectively introduced this distinction into the Marxist vocabulary. Once you accept that a society can house multiple modes at once, the central question changes. You stop asking “which single stage is this country at?” and start asking “how do the different modes within this society relate to one another?” That relationship is what the word articulation captures.

The meaning of articulation

“Articulation” is borrowed in the sense of how bones articulate at a joint: separate parts that are jointed together and move in relation to each other while remaining distinct. In this theory, articulation describes how the capitalist mode of production connects with non-capitalist modes within a single social formation.

The intellectual centre of this work was France. A group of scholars including Pierre-Philippe Rey, Claude Meillassoux, Emmanuel Terray, Georges Dupré, and Maurice Godelier, often called structural Marxists because they drew on both Marx and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss, developed the idea. Their method was ethnographic rather than purely historical. As one overview puts it, this approach allowed them to grasp the fact that the capitalist mode of production did not simply drive other modes out, but could coexist and “articulate” with them. The term “articulation” was specifically used to describe how the capitalist mode either existed asymmetrically alongside other modes or gradually forced them to conform to its needs.

Three interlinked practices

The structural Marxist framework also insisted that a mode of production is not purely economic. Following Althusser, it treats society as a structure made up of distinct but linked practices: the economic, the political, and the ideological. Each level has, in a sense, its own rhythm and its own relative independence, yet they remain bound together within the whole. Avoiding crude explanations of society requires systematic attention to the articulation between the economic, political, and ideological moments of production, otherwise analysis collapses into simple economic determinism. This is why the approach refuses to reduce everything to economics alone, and instead studies how power and ideas help hold the different modes of production together.

Capitalism in the periphery versus the core

The most powerful application of this theory is to development and underdevelopment. The approach builds on the broader distinction between “core” and “periphery” found in dependency and world-systems thinking. Core states industrialised first and gained a decisive advantage; peripheral states were structured to serve core needs, with surplus flowing from periphery to core through an international division of labour.

Where the articulation theorists added something new was in explaining the internal structure of peripheral economies. The French sociologist Pierre-Philippe Rey, whose 1968 work gave the approach its name, refined the older idea of “dualism” with the notion of articulation. He argued that underdevelopment in many regions was tied to the nature of indigenous society, and that integration into the world economy through trade and investment often strengthened existing ruling classes and reinforced their resistance to a full transition to capitalism. In the West, feudalism evolved into capitalism partly because of the dynamics of the feudal upper class. In regions that had never experienced European-style feudalism, the encounter with global capitalism produced something quite different.

Why capitalism stays “incomplete”

In core countries, capitalism spread through industrialisation and urbanisation until it became the overwhelmingly dominant mode, producing a relatively uniform economic system. In the periphery, capitalism arrives from outside and from above, through colonialism and imperialist penetration, rather than growing organically from within. The result is a restricted and uneven form of capitalism. According to this view, imperialist penetration disrupts the older non-capitalist mode but does not fully replace it, producing a series of effects that give the transition to capitalism its particular restricted and uneven form in Third World formations.

Crucially, capitalist enterprises in the periphery often depend on the surviving pre-capitalist sectors. The classic example is migrant labour: a worker may earn wages in a city or a mine while their family continues subsistence farming in the village. The non-capitalist sector effectively subsidises the capitalist one by feeding, raising, and supporting workers, allowing employers to pay wages below the true cost of reproducing labour. This is not a leftover from the past waiting to disappear. It is actively useful to capital, which is why it persists.

The Indian mode of production debate

These ideas landed with real force in India, sparking what became known as the mode of production debate, one of the most engaging scholarly arguments in Indian social science. Running through the 1960s and 1970s, the debate centred on the nature of the transition in Indian agriculture, from a feudal mode of production to a capitalist one. Scholars such as Ashok Rudra, Utsa Patnaik, Amit Bhaduri, and others took different positions on whether Indian agriculture was already capitalist, still semi-feudal, or something in between.

One influential position emphasised the persistence of semi-feudal relations. In this reading, features inherited from the colonial period, such as widespread tenancy, sharecropping, and cycles of debt bondage that tied labourers to landlords, survived even as new technology arrived. Even the Green Revolution, with its tractors and high-yield seeds, did not automatically dissolve these older relations. Some scholars argued that the same class relations that existed under British rule were reproduced at a slightly higher technical level of production after the Green Revolution within an unreformed agrarian structure.

The colonial imprint

Another strand stressed the lasting mark of colonialism, with some scholars proposing a “colonial mode of production” whose origins and structure derived from colonisation itself, shaped to meet the demands of imperialism. This connects directly to the articulation framework. Even those who concluded that capitalism had come to dominate Indian agriculture acknowledged a complication. As the debate wound down, one summary noted that India’s capitalism had emerged in a colonial setting, markedly different from the conditions of the metropolitan countries where capitalism was born. In other words, even a “capitalist” India was not a copy of Britain or the United States, precisely because of how its capitalism had articulated with pre-existing agrarian structures.

Strengths and criticisms

The approach offered a genuine advance. It moved beyond simplistic stage theories and beyond the assumption that developing countries would simply repeat the European experience. It gave analysts tools to study the messy, mixed reality of actual economies, where modern factories, family farms, informal workshops, and traditional crafts all operate within the same national space.

It also faced sharp criticism. Critics worried about a proliferation of modes: once you accept multiple coexisting modes, scholars began identifying more and more of them, until the concept risked becoming a label for almost any local arrangement. The sociologist Aidan Foster-Carter, in a well-known review, raised questions about whether articulation theorists were assuming a tidy linear transition between modes, prompting debate over the very notion of stages of articulation of modes of production within social formations. Others, working in the structuralist tradition of Hindess and Hirst, eventually questioned whether the concept of “social formation” was coherent at all and moved toward different forms of class analysis. The high level of abstraction, inherited from Althusser, also made the theory difficult to apply cleanly to concrete cases.

Why it still matters

Despite these debates, the core insight remains valuable. The articulation approach reminds us that economic development is rarely a simple march toward a single model. The presence of an informal economy, the survival of caste-linked labour arrangements, the dependence of urban industry on cheap rural migrant labour, and the uneven spread of capitalism across regions are not merely “backwardness.” They can be understood as structured relationships in which different modes of production are jointed together, often to the advantage of capital. Far from being a relic of the 1960s, the framework still helps explain why globalisation produces such uneven results across the developing world.

What do you think? Does the survival of older economic forms in a country like India represent a failure of capitalism to fully take hold, or is it evidence that capitalism actively benefits from keeping those older forms alive? And if pre-capitalist relations can be useful to modern capital, what would genuine economic transformation actually require?

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Table of Contents

What is a mode of production? 🔗

The problem with a simple stage theory 🔗

Social formation versus mode of production 🔗

Why this distinction matters 🔗

The meaning of articulation 🔗

Three interlinked practices 🔗

Capitalism in the periphery versus the core 🔗

Why capitalism stays “incomplete” 🔗

The Indian mode of production debate 🔗

The colonial imprint 🔗

Strengths and criticisms 🔗

Why it still matters 🔗