The more one directs one's attention to the economic and political compromises conveyed by the alliances, to the nature of the counterprestations that come to compensate the disequilibrium of the prestations of wives, and generally the original manner in which the aggregate of prestations is evaluated in a particular society, the more clearly the necessarily open nature of the system in extension appears, as in the case of the primitive mechanism of surplus value as a surplus value of code.