Mode of production
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 social relations are two essential
characteristics of social reproduction, and that the particular modality of those social relations
in the capitalist mode of production is inherently in conflict with the progressive development of
the productive capabilities of human beings.[1] A precursor concept was Adam Smith's mode of
subsistence, which delineated a progression of types of society based upon how the citizens of
a society provided for their material needs.[2]
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
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 materialist conception of history (see also materialism) and is in contrast
to an idealist analysis, (such as that criticised by Marx in Proudhon),[10] which states that the
fundamental driving force behind socioeconomic change are the ideas of enlightened
individuals.
Modes of production
Tribal and neolithic modes of production
Marx and Engels often referred to the "first" mode of production as primitive communism.[11] In
classical Marxism, the two earliest modes of production were those of the tribal band or horde,
and of the neolithic kinship group.[12] Tribal bands of hunter gatherers represented for most of
human history the only form of possible existence. Technological progress in the Stone Age was
very slow; social stratification was very limited (as were personal possessions, hunting grounds
being held in common);[13] and myth, ritual and magic are seen as the main cultural forms.[14]
With the adoption of agriculture at the outset of the Neolithic Revolution, and accompanying
technological advances in pottery, brewing, baking, and weaving,[15] there came a modest
increase in social stratification, and the birth of class[16] with private property held in hierarchical
kinship groups or clans.[17]
Animism was replaced by a new emphasis on gods of fertility;[18] and (possibly) a move from
matriarchy to patriarchy took place at the same time.[19]
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 dataprocessing – writing, cataloguing and archiving[20] - as well as by associated advances in
standardisation of weights and measures, mathematics, calendar-making and irrigation.[21]
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.[22] 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.[23]
Marxist historians such as John Haldon and Chris Wickham have argued that societies
interpreted by Marx as examples of the AMP are better understood as Tributary Modes of
Production (TMP). The TMP is characterized as having a "state class" as its specific form of
ruling class, which has exclusive or almost exclusive rights to extract surplus from peasants
over whom, however, it does not exercise tenurial control.[24][25]
Antique or ancient mode of production
Sometimes referred to as "slave society", an alternative route out of neolithic self-sufficiency
came in the form of the polis or city-state. 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]
Classical Greek and Roman societies are the most typical examples of this antique mode of
production. The forces of production associated with this mode include advanced (two field)
agriculture, the extensive use of animals in agriculture, industry (mining and pottery), and
advanced trade networks. It is differentiated from the Asiatic mode in that property forms
included the direct possession of individual human beings (slavery):[30] thus for example Plato in
his ideal city-state of Magnesia envisaged for the leisured ruling class of citizens that “their
farms have been entrusted to slaves, who provide them with sufficient produce of the land to
keep them in modest comfort”.[31] The ancient mode of production is also distinguished by the
way the ruling class usually avoids the more outlandish claims of being the direct incarnation of
a god and prefers to be the descendants of gods, or seeks other justifications for its rule,
including varying degrees of popular participation in politics.
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
The fall of the Western Roman Empire returned most of Western Europe to subsistence
agriculture, dotted with ghost towns and obsolete trade-routes[33] Authority too was localised, in
a world of poor roads and difficult farming conditions.[34] The new social form which, by the
ninth century, had emerged in place of the ties of family or clan, of sacred theocracy or legal
citizenship was a relationship based on the personal tie of vassal to lord, cemented by the link to
landholding in the guise of the fief.[35] This was the feudal mode of production, which dominated
the systems of the West between the fall of the classical world and the rise of capitalism.
(Similar systems existing in most of the world as well.) This period also saw the decentralization
of the ancient empires into the earliest nation-states.
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 such as the divine right of kings. 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.
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 merchant class arises and grows in strength, driven by the profit motive but
prevented from developing further profits by the nature of feudal society, in which, for instance,
the serfs are tied to the land and cannot become industrial workers and wage-earners. This
eventually precipitates an epoch of social revolution (i.e.: the English Civil War and the Glorious
Revolution of 1688, the French Revolution of 1789, etc.) wherein the social and political
organization of feudal society (or the property relations of feudalism) are overthrown by a
nascent bourgeoisie.[41]
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”.[46] The primary form of exploitation is by way of (formally
free) wage labour (see Das Kapital),[47] with debt peonage,[48] wage slavery, and other forms of
exploitation also possible. The ruling class for Marx is the bourgeoisie, or the owners of capital
who possess the means of production, who exploit the proletariat for surplus value, as the
proletarians possess only their own labour power which they must sell in order to survive.[49]
Yuval Harari reconceptualised the dichotomy for the 21st Century in terms of the rich who invest
to re-invest, and the remainder who go into debt in order to consume for the benefit of the
owners of the means of production.[50]
Under Capitalism the key forces of production include the overall system of modern production
with its supporting structures of bureaucracy, bourgeois democracy, and above all finance
capital. The system’s ideological underpinnings took place over the course of time, Frederic
Jameson for example considering that “the Western Enlightenment may be grasped as part of a
properly bourgeois cultural revolution, in which the values and the discourse, the habits and the
daily space, of the ancien régime were systematically dismantled so that in their place could be
set the new conceptualities, habits and life forms, and value systems of a capitalist market
society”[51] - utilitarianism, rationalised production (Weber), training and discipline (Foucault) and
a new capitalist time-structure.[52]
Socialist mode of production
Socialism is the mode of production which Marx considered will succeed capitalism, and which
will itself ultimately be succeeded by communism - the words socialism and communism both
predate Marx and have many definitions other than those he used, however - once the forces of
production outgrew the capitalist framework.[53]
In his 1917 work The State and Revolution, Lenin divided communism, the period following the
overthrow of capitalism, into three stages: First is the workers state, and then later, once the last
vestiges of the old capitalist ways have withered away, Higher and Lower phase Communism
which would actually have a socialist mode of production; These are known to most as
Socialism and Communism. Marx typically used the terms the "first phase" of communism and
the "higher phase" of communism, but Lenin points to later remarks by Engels which suggest
that Marx's "first phase" of communism typically equates with what people commonly think of
as socialism.[54]
The Marxist definition of socialism is a mode of production where the sole criterion for
production is use-value and therefore the law of value no longer directs economic activity.
Marxist production for use is coordinated through conscious economic planning,[55] while
distribution of economic output is based on the principle of to each according to his
contribution.[56] The social relations of socialism are characterized by the working class
effectively owning the means of production and the means of their livelihood, through one or a
combination of cooperative enterprises, common ownership, or worker's self-management.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels deliberately wrote very little on socialism, neglecting to provide
any details on how it might be organized on the grounds that, until the new mode of production
had itself emerged, all such theories would be merely Utopian: as Georges Sorel put it, “to
attempt to erect an ideological superstructure in advance of the conditions of production on
which it must be built...would be un-Marxist”.[57] However, later in life, Marx pointed to the Paris
Commune as the first example of a proletarian uprising and the model for a future socialist
society organized into communes, observing:
The Commune was formed of the municipal councilors, chosen by
universal suffrage in the various wards of the town, responsible and
revocable at any time. The majority of its members were naturally
working men, or acknowledged representatives of the working class....
The police, which until then had been the instrument of the
Government, was at once stripped of its political attributes, and turned
into the responsible, and at all times revocable, agent of the Commune.
So were the officials of all other branches of the administration. From
the members of the Commune downwards, the public service had to be
done at workmen's wages. The privileges and the representation
allowances of the high dignitaries of state disappeared along with the
high dignitaries themselves.... Having once got rid of the standing army
and the police, the instruments of physical force of the old government,
the Commune proceeded at once to break the instrument of spiritual
suppression, the power of the priests.... The judicial functionaries lost
that sham independence... they were thenceforward to be elective,
responsible, and revocable... The Commune, was to be a working, not a
parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same
time...Instead of deciding once in three or six years which member of
the ruling class was to represent and repress the people in parliament,
universal suffrage was to serve the people constituted in communes, as
individual suffrage serves every other employer in the search for
workers, foremen and accountants for his business.[58]
Communist mode of production
Communism is the final mode of production, anticipated to arise inevitably from socialism due
to historical forces. Marx did not speak in detail about the nature of a communist society, which
he would describe interchangeably with the words socialism and communism. However, he did
refer briefly in the Critique of the Gotha Programme to the full release of productive forces in "the
highest phase of communist society [...] [when] society will be able to inscribe on its banner:
'From each according to his capacities, to each according to his needs'".[59]
Different communities in specific society or country, different modes of production might come
up and exist alongside each other, linked together economically through trade and mutual
obligations. To these different modes correspond different in social classes and strata in the
population. For instance urban capitalist industry might co-exist with rural peasant production
for subsistence and simple exchange and tribal hunting and gathering. Old and new modes of
production might combine to form a hybrid economy.
However, Marx's view was that the expansion of capitalist markets tended to dissolve and
displace older ways of producing over time. A capitalist society was a society in which the
capitalist mode of production had become the dominant one. The culture, laws and customs of
that society might preserve many traditions of the preceding modes of production, thus although
two countries might both be capitalist, being economically based mainly on private enterprise
for profit and wage labour, these capitalisms might be very different in social character and
functioning, reflecting very different cultures, religions, social rules and histories.
Elaborating on this idea, Leon Trotsky famously described the economic development of the
world as a process of uneven and combined development of different co-existing societies and
modes of production which all influence each other. This means that historical changes which
took centuries to occur in one country might be truncated, abbreviated or telescoped in another.
Thus, for example, Trotsky observes in the opening chapter of his history of the Russian