Marxist theories and marxist inspired research have been very diverse in agricultural economics and no unified theory dominates. This diversity is linked to the characteristics of agriculture itself, but reference to marxism is also pluralistic ; it has been and remains the carrier of numerous potentialities and practices. This paper is a reflexion on the way this reference operates and on the conditions which can maintain its fruitfullness in the scientific field. It is mostly useful as a method providing tools suited to critical investigation of social reality. This critical examination procedure can be exerted on the theoretical models found in The Capital. Though agriculture seems to be a sector distant from those models, it may prove rewarding to use those tools in its analysis.
