Making, taking, relating, and planning Critical modes for a more-than-capitalist world

Abstract

I take up the “modes of production” presented by Eric Wolf in Europe and the people without history as a set of tools for broad, systemic, and critical thinking about diversity and change in economic and political organization, including the changing forms of capitalist accumulation and the sources, and limits, of capital’s planetary preponderance. I argue that Wolf ’s analysis centers problematics of “making,” “taking,” and “relating” that are necessary to critically assess how our collective capacities to create and destroy are mobilized, directed, and appropriated within and across polities, institutions, and circuits of value. I further argue for the importance of a fourth problematic, “planning,” highlighting the crucial political questions raised by the purposeful allocation of time, energy, and resources, as both actuality and potentiality.