This chapter has a very limited objective. It is simply to attempt to summarise the contribution of a number of Marxist anthropologists to the study of a particular kind of society termed segmentary by British anthropologists like Radcliffe-Brown, Evans-Pritchard and Fortes. I shall be concerned in particular to compare and contrast the approaches of various Marxist writers to segmentary societies, as well as to comment briefly on the possibility that there exists a "new" mode of production, termed by some the "lineage mode of production".