Mode of Production

Modes of Production in History

Marx saw human history as divided into epochs shaped by the existing mode of production:

• Primitive communism: Human society is organized into small tribal groups with shared production and consumption.
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• Slave mode of production: This mode, the first class-based society, was centered on the use of coerced labor—the direct possession of humans—as in ancient Greece and Rome.
• Feudal mode of production: Feudalism refers to a set of reciprocal legal and military obligations among the warrior elite of Europe during the Middle Ages. It also refers to the manorial bonds tying the peasantry (serfs) to the land.
• Capitalist mode of production: Surplus value (profit) accrues through the control over wage labor. The ruling class is the bourgeoisie, which exploits the proletariat. The key forces of production include the factory system accompanied by the development of a modern bureaucratic state.
• Socialist mode of production: In Marx's framework, the socialist mode of production was a theoretical conception of a society based on workers' control over production. Forms of collective social organization, such as cooperatives, strike committees, and labor unions, could approximate a socialist mode of production.
• Communist mode of production: This is a hypothetical stage at which social classes will cease to exist. Marx argued that the internal crises of capitalism would give rise to this stage.

Articulation of Modes of Production

By the late 1960s, scholars influenced by Marxist theory were increasingly concerned with understanding the uneven spread of capitalism throughout the world, especially in areas referred to as the Third World. The Latin American dependency school sought to show how the integration of colonized regions into the world economy did not produce patterns of development similar to Western Europe; rather, it produced under-development or dependent development, a system of permanent economic extraction and unequal relations. Thus, the idea of successive modes of production was critiqued for its evolutionary cast, and many theorists turned to the idea of the articulation of distinct modes of production in explaining uneven development.

The articulation of modes of production approach to studying development was influential during the 1970s and early 1980s in the sociology of development literature and in what became known as the new economic anthropology. The contribution of this approach was to show how purportedly precapitalist social relations may persist within the broader development of a capitalist economy. Indeed, these relations may exist not as separate from capitalism or as pockets of decline but rather as intrinsic to the extension of capitalism. As Aidan Foster-Carter noted in 1978, capitalism does not necessarily dissolve what came before it; it only coexists with other types of societies.

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