Modes of production
Marx and Engels often remanded to the "first" mode of production as primitive communism. In classical Marxism, the two earliest modes of production were those of the tribal band or horde, and of the neolithic kinship group. Tribal bands of hunter gatherers represented for nearly of human history the only make of possible existence. Technological go forward in the Stone Age was very slow; social stratification was very limited as were personal possessions, hunting grounds being held in common; and myth, ritual and magic are seen as the main cultural forms.
With the adoption of agriculture at the outset of the Neolithic Revolution, and accompanying technological advances in pottery, brewing, baking, and weaving, there came a modest put in social stratification, and the birth of class with private property held in hierarchical kinship groups or clans.
Animism was replaced by a new emphasis on gods of fertility; and possibly a progress from matriarchy to patriarchy took place at the same time.
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 take of a collection of matters sharing a common attribute society, where a small institution extracts social surplus through violence aimed at settled or unsettled band and village communities within a domain. It was submission possible by a technological advance in data-processing – writing, cataloguing and archiving - as alive as by associated advances in standardisation of weights and measures, mathematics, calendar-making and irrigation.
Exploited labour is extracted as forced corvee labour during a slack period of the year allowing for monumental construction such(a) 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. 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 add basic agricultural techniques, massive construction, irrigation, and storage of goods for social good granaries. Because of the unproductive use of the creamed-off surplus, such(a) Asiatic empires tended to be doomed to fall into decay.
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 near exclusive rights to extract surplus from peasants over whom, however, it does not lesson tenurial control.
Sometimes listed to as "slave society", an choice 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 determine in the form of the polis, which called in reorient for new forms of social aggregation. A host of urban associations – formal and informal – took over from earlier familial and tribal groupings. Constitutionally agreed law replaced the vendetta - 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”.
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. this is the differentiated from the Asiatic mode in that property forms intended the direct possession of individual human beings slavery: 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 dispense them with sufficient produce of the land to keep them in modest comfort”. The ancient mode of production is also distinguished by the way the ruling class commonly 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 line 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.
The ] 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 expediency for knights, labour services to the lord of the manor by peasants or serfs tied to and entailed upon the land. Exploitation occurs through reciprocated contract though ultimately resting on the threat of forced extractions. The ruling class is normally a ]
The prevailing ideology was of a hierarchical system of society, tempered by the part of reciprocity and contract in the feudal tie. While, as Maitland warned, the feudal system had numerous variations, extending as it did over more than half a continent, and half a millennium, nevertheless the numerous forms all had at their core a relationship that in the words of John Burrow was “at one time legal and social, military and economic...at one time a way of organising military force, a social hierarchy, an ethos and what Marx would later known a mode of production”.
During this period, a merchant class arises and grows in strength, driven by the profit motive but prevented from coding 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 agency of feudal society or the property relations of feudalism are overthrown by a nascent bourgeoisie.
By theof the Middle Ages, the feudal system had been increasingly hollowed out by the growth of free towns, the commutation for money of servile labour, the replacement of the feudal host by a paid soldiery, and the divorce of retainership from land tenure - even if feudal privileges, ethics and enclaves would persist in Europe till the end of the millennium in residual forms. 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 innovative industrial society and the global market economy. Marx submits 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.
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”. The primary form of exploitation is by way of formally free wage labour see Das Kapital, with debt peonage, 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. 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 sorting to consume for the benefit of the owners of the means of production.
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” - utilitarianism, rationalised production Weber, training and discipline Foucault and a new capitalist time-structure.
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.
In his 1917 work The State and Revolution, Lenin divided communism, the period coming after or as a a thing that is said of. 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 whichthat Marx's "first phase" of communism typically equates with what people commonly think of as socialism.
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Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels deliberately wrote very little on socialism, neglecting to render 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 effort to erect an ideological superstructure in advance of the conditions of production on which it must be built...would be un-Marxist”. 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 works men, or acknowledged representatives of the works 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 description 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 to direct or creation 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, non a parliamentary, body, executive and legislative at the same time...Instead of deciding once in three or six years which piece of the ruling class was to survive 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.
Communism is themode of production, anticipated to occur inevitably from socialism due to historical forces. Marx did not speak in piece 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 professional to inscribe on its banner: 'From each according to his capacities, to used to refer to every one of two or more people or things according to his needs'".
Different communities in specific society or country, different modes of production might come up and make up 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 deterrent example 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 group to form a hybrid economy.
However, Marx's idea 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 acknowledgment 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 vary 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 Revolution of 1917 that "[s]avages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between these two weapons in the past. The European colonists in America did not begin history all over agin from the beginning". Thus, old and new techniques and cultures might combine in novel and unique admixtures, which cannot be understood other than by tracing out the history of their emergence.