This article offers a preliminary theoretical framework for an analysis of labour in urban Senegal. The writers' studies of petty commodity and commodity production in Dakar—arising from which they propose to analyse the process of class formation and the class position of various sections of the urban labour force—require at the outset an analysis of the dialectical relationship between the dominant capitalist mode of production and the subordinate formsof production in underdeveloped countries. The term formof production is deliberate. Modeof production seems to the writers inappropriate, since it refers essentially to a totality which is self‐sufficient at both the superstructural level and at the economic base. Forms of production exist at the margins of the capitalist mode of production, but are nevertheless integrated into and subordinate to it. This article sets out to examine the processes and relations of production which characterise certain subordinate forms of production.