production modes

Economy-And-Finanzas

2022

We explain what are the modes of production, the forces and relations of production. Also, the feudal, capitalist and other modes.

Each mode of production depends on the resources available and the social structure.

What are the modes of production?

According to perspective Marxist of the economic history of human being, known as Historical Materialism, modes of production are the specific ways in which economic activity is organized within a society specific human resources, for the satisfaction of their needs for goods and services.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels discussed this concept for the first time in their book German ideology. It was written between 1845 and 1846, published posthumously in 1932. Marxist theory proposes that a analysis of the modes of production from the beginning of civilization to today, allows us to understand the way in which the economy has changed in the weather.

These changes depend, on the one hand, on the productive possibilities of the moment, such as the technology, the availability of resources, the development of knowledge, etc. However, they are also affected by the social and political order of the society that said model produced.

To understand them, a distinction is made between two important factors:

  • The productive forces. Where the human actors who put into practice their work force, that is, their body and their time to work, and the set of organized knowledge and tools necessary to produce, known collectively as means of production.
  • The relations of production. The relationships that exist between the different productive forces and that organize society based on relationships between people and their work objects, as well as between the different social classes.

According to Marx's theories, the ability to produce and the participation of the different social classes in the productive cycle determine the mode of production of a society. These modes can be read in a diachronic or evolutionary way to understand how the changes occur between one and the next.

Production relationships

The relations of production, as mentioned before, have to do with the place that individuals and social classes occupy within the productive circuit, especially with the control and ownership of the means of production. It is, then, a type of relationship between men, but with respect to things. They may be:

  • Legally validated property and control relationships with respect to real estate, assets or machines used in production.
  • Labor relations or work-sharing relationships, including domestic ones.
  • Socioeconomic dependencies between individuals according to their participation in the productive cycle.
  • Quantitative proportions of social actors in the productive circuit and in obtaining its benefits.

Primitive mode of production

The first mode of production that Marxism contemplates is the primitive one, also known as primitive communism. Typical of the prehistoric times, prior to the so-called Neolithic Revolution that produced the farming and the cattle raising.

Primitive communism occurs in the absence of a Condition and of a social hierarchy, as well as of social classes, distinguishing at the time of distributing the work only in the physical capacities of each one. It is a limited production model, with a very low level of developing, which barely allows the subsistence of the community.

Slave production mode

Slaves are treated as the property of other human beings.

The slave mode of production, as its name indicates, is based on the submission of other human beings and their reduction to the condition of property, at most citizens third, whose wills are subject to a private master or to the State itself.

Slaves give up all their work capacity, without participating in the distribution of the benefits obtained from it, except for the minimum essential to guarantee their survival and continuous work. This was the model of the classical societies of the antiquity, What Greece and Rome.

Feudal mode of production

The feudal production model reigned in many agricultural societies of antiquity and in the Europe medieval from the fall of the Roman Empire to the Renaissance European and entry into the Modernity.

It was characterized by a decentralized political order, in which the different kingdoms recognized the local authority of the feudal lords, landowners from the military nobility. These, in turn, ruled over the commoner peasantry.

The feudal lords took a high percentage of the production that the peasants obtained from their lands. In return, they offered them order, stability, military protection, and permission to inhabit and feed of the harvest. It was an eminently rural production model.

Capitalist mode of production

According to Marxism, capitalism is the exploitation of wage earners.

It is the post-production model mercantilism and the rise of merchants as the ruling class, rather than the nobility. It arose with the bourgeois revolutions that put an end to the Middle Ages and later to monarchical absolutism.

As money displaced land tenure in importance, and the science and the technology to faith in religion, a new world took its first steps towards an industrial society. The peasant serfs migrated en masse to the cities and they became workers workers.

This is the current model in most countries in the world today. According to the Marxist reading, it consists of the exploitation of the labor power of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie, owners of the means of production, in exchange for a salary.

Thus, the bourgeoisie keeps the capital gain, which is the added value that workers contribute to the final price of the product, and which is always higher than salary that is given to them.

Socialist mode of production

Proposed by Marx and Engels as the transitory model between the capitalism and the classless utopian society, consists of a society whose production is orchestrated according to the use and needs of the community, rather than accumulation and accumulation. gain monetary.

For this, the State has to organize the productive forces, abolishing to some extent the private property and preventing the unequal distribution of wealth. This type of mode has never been successfully implemented anywhere. Marx and Engels themselves did not write down how it could happen or be produced.

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