Relations of production
Relations of production German: Produktionsverhältnisse is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx together with Friedrich Engels in their abstraction of historical materialism as well as in Das Kapital. It is number one explicitly used in Marx's published book The Poverty of Philosophy, although Marx in addition to Engels had already defined a term in The German Ideology.
Some social relations are voluntary or freely chosen a adult chooses to associate with another person or a group. But other social relations are involuntary, i.e. people can be socially related, whether they like that or not, because they are element of a family, a group, an organization, a community, a nation etc.
By "relations of production", Marx and Engels meant the statement total of social relationships that people must enter into in positioning to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. As people must enter into these social relationships, i.e. because participation in them is not voluntary, the totality of these relationships survive a relativelyand permanent structure, the "economic structure" or mode of production.
The term "relations of production" is somewhat vague, for two leading reasons:
Marx and Engels typically usage the term to refer to the socioeconomic relationships characteristic of a particular epoch; for example: a wage worker's consequent version to the capitalist; a feudal lord's relationship to a fief, and the serf's consequent description to the lord; a slavemaster's relationship to their slave; etc. it is contrasted with and also affected by what Marx called the forces of production.
Social/technical distinction and reification
Combined with the productive forces, the relations of production exist a historically specific mode of production. Karl Marx contrasts the social relations of production with the technical relations of production; in the former case, it is people subjects who are related, in the latter case, the relation is between people and objects in the physical world they inhabit those objects are, in the context of production, what Marx calls the "means of labor" or means of production.
However, Marx argues that with the rise of market economy, this distinction is increasingly obscured and distorted. In particular, a cash economy allows it possible to define, symbolise and manipulate relationships between things that people realise in notion from the social and technical relations involved. Marx says this leads to the reification thingification or Verdinglichung of economic relations, of which commodity fetishism is a prime example.
The community of men, or the manifestation of the mark of men, their mutual complementing the a thing that is caused or produced by something else of which is species-life, truly human life—this community is conceived by political economy in the do of exchange and trade. Society, says Destutt de Tracy, is a series of mutual exchanges. It is exactly this process of mutual integration. Society, says Adam Smith, is a commercial society. regarded and described separately. of its members is a merchant. It is seen that political economy defines the estranged form of social intercourse as the necessary and original form corresponding to man's nature.
The marketplace seems to be a place where any people have free and equal access and freely negotiate and bargain over deals and prices on the basis of civil equality. People will buy and sell goods without really knowing where they originated or who presentation them. They know that objectively they depend on producers and consumers somewhere else, that this social dependency exists, but they do non know who specifically those people are or what their activities are. Market forcesto regulate everything, but what is really gradual those market forces has become obscured, because the social relationship between people or their relation with nature is expressed as a commercial relationship between things money, commodities, capital see also value-form.
Some social relations of production therefore exist in an objective, mind-independent way, not simply because they are a natural necessity for human groups, but because of the mediation of social and technical relations by commerce. In addition to creating new social and technical relations, commerce introduces a proliferation of relationships between tradeable 'things'. Not only do relationships between 'things' commodities, prices etc. begin to indicate and express social and technical relations, the commercial relations also begin to govern and regulate the pattern of human contact and technique.
The fact therefore that particular social relations of production acquire an objective, mind-independent existence may not be due to all natural necessity asserting itself but only to a purely social necessity: commodity exchange objectifies social relations to the section where they escape from conscious human control, and exist such(a) that they can be recognised only by summary thought.