Mode of production
Part of a series on |
Marxism |
---|
In the Marxist theory of historical materialism, a mode of production (German: Produktionsweise, "the way of producing") is a specific combination of the:
- Productive forces: these include human labour power and means of production (tools, machinery, factory buildings, infrastructure, technical knowledge, raw materials, plants, animals, exploitable land).
- Social and technical relations of production: these include the property, power and control relations (legal code) governing the means of production of society, cooperative work associations, relations between people and the objects of their work, and the relations among the social classes.
Marx said that a person's productive ability and participation in
Significance of concept
Building on the four-stage theory of human development of the Scottish Enlightenment – Hunting/Pastoral/Agricultural/Commercial Societies, each with its own socio-cultural characteristics[3] - Marx articulated the concept of mode of production: “The mode of production in material life determines the general character of the social, political, and spiritual processes of life”.[4]
Marx considered that the way people relate to the physical world and the way people relate to each other socially are bound up together in specific and necessary ways: “men [who] produce cloth, linen, silk...also produce the ‘social relations’ amid which they prepare cloth and linen”.[5] People must consume to survive, but to consume they must produce and in producing they necessarily enter into relations which exist independently of their will.
For Marx, the whole secret of why/how a social order exists and the causes of social change must be discovered in the specific mode of production that a society has.[6] He further argued that the mode of production substantively shaped the nature of the mode of distribution, the mode of circulation and the mode of consumption, all of which together constitute the economic sphere. To understand the way wealth was distributed and consumed, it was necessary to understand the conditions under which it was produced.
A mode of production is historically distinctive for Marx because it constitutes part of an organic totality (or self-reproducing whole) which is capable of constantly re-creating its own initial conditions and thus perpetuate itself in a more or less stable ways for centuries, or even millennia. By performing social surplus labour in a specific system of property relations, the labouring classes constantly reproduce the foundations of the social order. A mode of production normally shapes the mode of distribution, circulation and consumption and is regulated by the state. As Marx wrote to Annenkov, “Assume particular stages of development in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corresponding social order, a corresponding organization of the family and of the ranks and classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society”.[7]
However any given mode of production will also contain within it (to a greater or lesser extent) relics of earlier modes, as well as seeds of new ones.[8] The emergence of new productive forces will cause conflict in the current mode of production. When conflict arises, the modes of production can evolve within the current structure or cause a complete breakdown.
Process of socioeconomic change
The process by which social and economic systems evolve is based on the premise of improving technology. Specifically, as the level of technology improves, existing forms of social relations become increasingly insufficient for fully exploiting technology. This generates internal inefficiencies within the broader socioeconomic system, most notably in the form of class conflict. The obsolete social arrangements prevent further social progress while generating increasingly severe contradictions between the level of technology (forces of production) and social structure (social relations, conventions and organization of production) which develop to a point where the system can no longer sustain itself and is overthrown through internal social revolution that allows for the emergence of new forms of social relations that are compatible with the current level of technology (productive forces).[9]
The fundamental driving force behind structural changes in the socioeconomic organization of civilization are underlying material concerns—specifically, the level of technology and extent of human knowledge and the forms of social organization they make possible. This comprises what Marx termed the
Modes of production
The main modes of production that
). In his idea of a future communist society, Marx explains that classes would no longer exist, and therefore the exploitation of one class of another is abolished.Primitive communism
Marx and Engels often referred to the "first" mode of production as
Asiatic and tributary modes of production
The Asiatic mode of production is a controversial contribution to Marxist theory, first used to explain pre-slave and pre-feudal large earthwork constructions in India, the Euphrates and Nile river valleys (and named on this basis of the primary evidence coming from greater "Asia"). The Asiatic mode of production is said to be the initial form of class society, where a small group extracts social surplus through violence aimed at settled or unsettled band and village communities within a domain. It was made possible by a technological advance in data-processing – writing, cataloguing and archiving[15] - as well as by associated advances in standardisation of weights and measures, mathematics, calendar-making and irrigation.[16]
Exploited labour is extracted as forced corvee labour during a slack period of the year (allowing for monumental construction such as the pyramids, ziggurats and ancient Indian communal baths). Exploited labour is also extracted in the form of goods directly seized from the exploited communities. The primary property form of this mode is the direct religious possession of communities (villages, bands, and hamlets, and all those within them) by the gods: in a typical example, three-quarters of the property would be allotted to individual families, while the remaining quarter would be worked for the theocracy.[17] The ruling class of this society is generally a semi-theocratic aristocracy which claims to be the incarnation of gods on earth. The forces of production associated with this society include basic agricultural techniques, massive construction, irrigation, and storage of goods for social benefit (granaries). Because of the unproductive use of the creamed-off surplus, such Asiatic empires tended to be doomed to fall into decay.[18]
Marxist historians such as
Ancient mode of production
The agricultural revolution lead to the development of the first civilizations. With the adoption of agriculture at the outset of the Neolithic Revolution, and accompanying technological advances in pottery, brewing, baking, and weaving,[21] there came a modest increase in social stratification, and the birth of class[22] with private property held in hierarchical kinship groups or clans.[23] Animism was replaced by a new emphasis on gods of fertility;[24] and (possibly) a move from matriarchy to patriarchy took place at the same time.[25] Technological advances in the form of cheap iron tools, coinage, and the alphabet, and the division of labour between industry, trade and farming, enabled new and larger units to develop in the form of the polis,[26] which called in turn for new forms of social aggregation. A host of urban associations – formal and informal – took over from earlier familial and tribal groupings.[27] Constitutionally agreed law replaced the vendetta[28] - an advance celebrated in such new urban cultural forms as Greek tragedy: thus, as Robert Fagles put it, “The Oresteia is our rite of passage from savagery to civilization...from the blood vendetta to the social justice”.[29]
It was not so much democracy, but rather the universalising of its citizenship, that eventually enabled Rome to set up a Mediterranean-wide urbanised empire, knit together by roads, harbours, lighthouses, aqueducts, and bridges, and with engineers, architects, traders and industrialists fostering interprovincial trade between a growing set of urban centres.[32]
Feudal mode of production
Feudalism Is the third mode of production where by the major means of production was land. The
The primary form of property is the possession of land in reciprocal contract relations, military service for knights, labour services to the lord of the manor by peasants or serfs tied to and entailed upon the land.[36] Exploitation occurs through reciprocated contract (though ultimately resting on the threat of forced extractions).[37] The ruling class is usually a nobility or aristocracy, typically legitimated by some concurrent form of theocracy. The primary forces of production include highly complex agriculture (two, three field, lucerne fallowing and manuring) with the addition of non-human and non-animal power devices (clockwork and wind-mills) and the intensification of specialisation in the crafts—craftsmen exclusively producing one specialised class of product.[citation needed]
The prevailing ideology was of a hierarchical system of society, tempered by the element of reciprocity and contract in the feudal tie.[38] While, as Maitland warned, the feudal system had many variations, extending as it did over more than half a continent, and half a millennium,[39] nevertheless the many forms all had at their core a relationship that (in the words of John Burrow) was “at once legal and social, military and economic...at once a way of organising military force, a social hierarchy, an ethos and what Marx would later call a mode of production”.[40]
During this period, a
Capitalist mode of production
By the close of the Middle Ages, the feudal system had been increasingly hollowed out by the growth of free towns, the commutation for money of servile labour,[42] the replacement of the feudal host by a paid soldiery, and the divorce of retainership from land tenure[43] - even if feudal privileges, ethics and enclaves would persist in Europe till the end of the millennium in residual forms.[44] Feudalism was succeeded by what Smith called the Age of Commerce, and Marx the capitalist mode of production, which spans the period from mercantilism to imperialism and beyond, and is usually associated with the emergence of modern industrial society and the global market economy. Marx maintained that central to the new capitalist system was the replacement of a system of money serving as the key to commodity exchange (C-M-C, commerce), by a system of money leading (via commodities) to the re-investment of money in further production (M-C-M’, capitalism) - the new and overriding social imperative.[45]
The primary form of property is that of private property in commodity form – land, materials, tools of production, and human labour, all being potentially commodified and open to exchange in a cash nexus by way of (state guaranteed) contract: as Marx put it, “man himself is brought into the sphere of private property”.
Under
Communist mode of production
Lower-stage of communism
The bourgeoisie, as Marx stated in The Communist Manifesto, has "forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons—the modern working class—the proletarians."[53] Historical materialists henceforth believe that the modern proletariat are the new revolutionary class in relation to the bourgeoisie, in the same way that the bourgeoisie was the revolutionary class in relation to the nobility under feudalism.[54] The proletariat, then, must seize power as the new revolutionary class in a dictatorship of the proletariat.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.[55]
Marx also describes a communist society developed alongside the proletarian dictatorship:
Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labor employed on the products appear here as the value of these products, as a material quality possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect fashion but directly as a component part of total labor. The phrase "proceeds of labor", objectionable also today on account of its ambiguity, thus loses all meaning. What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society—after the deductions have been made—exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.[56]
This lower-stage of communist society is, according to Marx, analogous to the lower-stage of capitalist society, i.e. the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in that both societies are "stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges." The emphasis on the idea that modes of production do not exist in isolation but rather are materialized from the previous existence is a core idea in historical materialism.
There is considerable debate among communists regarding the nature of this society. Some such as
Higher-stage of communism
To Marx, the
Marx made the following comments on the higher-phase of communist society:
In a higher phase of communist society, after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the
division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life's prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly—only then can the narrow horizon of bourgeois right be crossed in its entirety and society inscribe on its banners: From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs![59]
Base and superstructure
Marxists such as Chris Harman,[60] Terry Eagleton[61] and R.J.Robinson[62] have argued that historical models of production generally rely upon forces and relations of production that they cannot produce through their own normal means. For example, pre-modern complex societies such as ancient Rome or the Aztecs were unable to control a wide range of natural phenomena such as the weather, harvests, childbirth, and so on. Where such limited modes of production prevailed, systems of practice and then belief for persuading or bribing supernatural powers to intervene on humanity's behalf developed - i.e., religions. Similarly, industrial societies require a large supply of skilled and disciplined workers, but these cannot be created through the ordinary mechanisms of capitalism (i.e., producing and selling commodities).
This gives rise to the Marxist paradigm of 'Base and superstructure', in which such shortcomings in the underlying mode of production (the 'base') are managed through 'relatively autonomous' systems ('superstructures').
See also
- Base and superstructure
- Bureaucratic collectivism
- Capitalist mode of production
- Crisis (Marxian)
- Division of labour
- Critique of political economy
- Means of production
- Relations of production
- Socialist mode of production
- Social system
References
- ^ Marx, Grundrisse. (English Translation)
- ^ New Voices on Adam Smith, by Leonidas Montes, Eric Schliesser. Routledge, March 2006. P 295.
- ^ R Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge 1976) p. 117-9 and p. 186-8
- ^ Quoted in J Childers Ed., The Columbia Dictionary of Modern Literary and Cultural Criticism (New York 1995) p. 191
- ^ Quoted in J O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (London 1972) p. 115
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 11
- ^ Quoted in J O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (London 1972) p. 116
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 12
- ^ Marxism.org: Mode of Production.
- ^ J O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (London 1972) p. 115-6
- ISBN 978-0-19-860987-2.
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 46-7
- ^ J Diamond, The World Until Yesterday (Penguin 2012) p. 13-1
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 47
- ^ Y Harari, Sapiens (London 2011) p. 137 and p. 145
- ^ G Childe, What Happened in History (Penguin 1954) p. 117-125
- ^ G Childe, What Happened in History (Penguin 1954) p. 94-5
- ^ A R Burn, Persia and the Greeks (Stanford 1984) p. 565
- ^ Haldon, John (1994). The State and the Tributary Mode of Production. Verso.
- ^ Wickham, Chris (2005). Framing the Early Middle Ages: Europe and the Mediterranean 400–800. Oxford University Press.
- ^ G Childe, What Happened in History (Penguin 1954) p. 60-2
- ^ J Diamond, The World Until Yesterday (London 2012) p. 15-17
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 47
- ^ Y Harari, Sapiens (London 2011) p. 235-7
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 51
- ^ G Childe, What Happened in History (Penguin 1954) p. 25 and 196-7
- ^ O. Murray ed., The Oxford History of the Classical World (Oxford 1991) p. 207-10
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 51
- ^ R Fagles trans., The Oresteia (Penguin 1981) p. 19-21
- Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel (London 1980) p. 57
- ^ Plato, The Laws (Penguin 1988) p. 296
- ^ G Childe, What Happened in History (Penguin 1954) p. 263-73
- ^ P Wolff, The Awakening of Europe (Penguin 1968) p. 22-3
- ^ R W Southern The Making of the Middle Ages (London 1993) p. 20 and p. 80
- ^ J M Wallace-Hadrill, The Barbarian West (London 1964) p. 110-1 and p. 143
- ^ Barrington Moore Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Penguin 1977) p. 419 and p. 4-5
- R H Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London 1937) p. 56
- ^ W Ullmann A history of Political Thought in the Middle Ages (Penguin 1965) p. 90 and p. 147
- ^ G C Coulton Medieval Panorama (Cambridge 1938) p. 50
- ^ J Burrow, A History of Histories (Penguin 2009) p. 317
- ^ Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Marx, Early writings, Penguin, 1975, p425-6
- ^ G C Coulton Medieval Panorama (Cambridge 1938) p. 73-6 and 284-6
- ^ Barrington Moore Jr, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (Penguin 1977) p. 5
- ^ M Scott, Medieval Europe (London 1964) p. 241 and p. 420
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 267
- ^ Quoted in J O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (London 1972) p. 26
- ^ J O’Neill, Sociology as a Skin Trade (London 1972) p. 191
- ^ Y Harari, Sapiens (London 2011) p. 368-71
- ^ P. King, The Philosophy Book (London 2011) p. 199-200
- ^ Y Harari, Sapiens (London 2011) p. 390
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 50
- ^ M Hardt ed., The Jameson Reader (Oxford 2000) p. 47-50 and p. 277-8
- ^ Marx, Karl. "The Communist Manifesto".
- ^ Marx, Karl. "Critique of the Gotha Programme".
- ^ Marx, Karl. "Critique of the Gotha Programme".
- ^ Marx, Karl. "Critique of the Gotha Programme".
- ^ Stalin, Joseph. "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR".
- ^ Marx, Karl. "The German Ideology".
- ^ Marx, Karl. "Critique of the Gotha Programme".
- ^ Harman, C. (1998). Marxism and History. Two Essays. London: Bookmarks.
- ^ Eagleton, T. (2000). ‘Base and superstructure revisited.’ New Literary History, (31, No. 2, ‘Economics and Culture: Production, Consumption, and Value’: 231-240).
- ^ Robinson, R.J. (2023). Base and Superstructure. Understanding Marxism’s Second Biggest Idea. Alton: Putney:2.
Further reading
- Perry Anderson, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism.
- Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State.
- G.E.M. De Ste Croix, The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World: From the Archaic Age to the Arab Conquests.
- Chris Harman, A People's History of the World.
- Barry Hindess & Paul Q. Hirst, Pre-capitalist modes of production. London: Routledge, 1975.
- Lawrence Krader, The Asiatic Mode of Production; Sources, Development and Critique in the Writings of Karl Marx.
- Ernest Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory.
- Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View.
- George Novack, Understanding History: Marxist Essays.
- Fritjof Tichelman, The Social Evolution of Indonesia: The Asiatic Mode of Production and its Legacy.
- W.M.J. van Binsbergen & P.L. Geschiere, ed., Old Modes of Production and Capitalist Encroachment.
- Charles Woolfson, The Labour Theory of Culture.
- Harold Wolpe, ed. The articulation of modes of production.
- Michael Perelman, Steal This Idea: Intellectual Property Rights and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity.