Introduction

At a time when the developed capitalist nations of the world appear to have renounced all interest in the Third World other than interest owed to them on money lent and spent long ago, it may seem strange to attribute any force of economic expansion at all to the capitalist system. Curiously enough, the theories of Lenin, Luxemburg and Bukharin seem now to have been an optimistic overestimate of the power of capitalism to transform the world in its own image (Lenin n.d.; Luxemburg 1951; Bukharin 1972). If there is a point, then, in continuing to use the phrase ‘resistance to capitalism’ in characterizing an area such as the Peruvian Andes, it is not from a belief that there are in existence strong tendencies to capitalize the area which are being resisted, but rather from a wish to start from a position that takes the particular area as outside capitalism – as, in important respects, non-capitalist.

Although this chapter concentrates mainly on exchange relations, then, it does so from a framework which does not equate commodity exchange with capitalism. By whatever criterion, whether in terms of forms of property, relations of exploitation, laws of motion, or the protestant ethic, the predominant social relations in the area I wish to talk about are not capitalist ones; and yet relations of exchange, both among the people of the area, and between them and the outside world, are extensive, and have undergone important shifts, it seems, in recent years.