This article analyses the contrast between an exchange modality characterized by Mauss in the 1930's as "communist" and two others: agonistic and mercantile. Mauss was never a communist, but rather was a socialist. As such, he experienced the Russian Revolution as an ethnographer would, at the same time he considered it "an experiment". An important inspiration of the Essai sur le don was the impact he had visiting Russia and Lenin's "New Economic Policy", which recognized the impossibility of an abolition of the market. The Essai has as its implicit matter the possibility of a new society in which the State would encompass the market, both understood as logical and historical transformations of forms of the gift, tributes in the case of State.
Marcel Mauss; Communism; State