Method of production in the context of Marx's theory

The mode of production is (according to the theory of Karl Marx) a unity characteristic of a specific historical period of production relations and productive forces that provide society with material goods.

The productive forces are a combination of labor and tools. The labor force takes into account the knowledge, skills and experience corresponding to the historical context, and the tools differ in their complexity and mechanization. Production forces directly depend on the natural habitat of a particular social formation.

Production relations are historically established ways of organizing production, which include property rights, the distribution of material wealth and other legal aspects of relationships.

Karl Marx, following the stages of social evolution proposed by Hegel and Saint-Simon, distinguished five main historical modes of production:

- primitive communal;

- slave (antique);

- feudal;

- capitalist;

- Communist.

Primitive communal mode of production

It lasted from the beginning of the Stone Age and up to the moment of the emergence of class society (IX century BC). Initially based on the appropriating economy, i.e. People only used what nature gave. With the development of production relations and productive forces, with the appearance of certain skills and tools of labor, the primitive communal mode acquired features of the extractive economy.

Characteristic features of the system:

- economic equality, ie equal attitude of all members of society to the means of production and to the distribution of material goods;

- lack of private property;

- Lack of operation.

Such an equitably-collective nature of the relationship was based on an extremely low level of development of productive forces. Produced material wealth was sufficient mainly to maintain life. At this stage, the surplus product did not yet exist. And only the subsequent development of productive forces ensured the emergence of an excess product, which entailed new ways of distribution and the corresponding allocation of classes of society, the birth of commodity exchange between neighboring tribes, the emergence of private property and the initial forms of exploitation.

An ancient way of production

It began in the IX century BC. In Greece and continued until the II - IV centuries AD. At this stage, private property existed along with the communal, cities emerged with signs of statehood. Ownership of labor was based on ownership of land. The cities existed more like a military-defensive formation, rather than a production one. The conduct of the war was a great public work and a way of obtaining material goods. A distinctive feature of the production relations of this period was the presence of slaves and slave labor - as a "consistent and necessary result" of the development of the existing society.

Feudal mode of production

This is the period from the end of the IV - the beginning of the 5th centuries, which took shape after the slave system (in the countries of the Mediterranean, the Middle East and North Africa) or immediately after the primitive communal (in the Slavic territories).

This method of production is based on the formation of classes of feudal lords and peasants, based on landed property. The feudal lords were landowners, and the peasants fell into personal property, because they conducted their small private production on their land. For the right to use the land, peasants paid their landlords with their labor, natural products or money.

During the early Middle Ages peasants gained relative independence and independence, which led to a significant increase in productive forces, the development of crafts and progress in the management of agriculture. The cities are developing and a new social stratum is being formed-free citizens, and subsequently the bourgeois.

At the beginning of the XV century in most countries of Western Europe, peasants were freed from personal feudal dependence. Gradually the beginnings of capitalist society, which finally strengthened with the help of bourgeois revolutions in the late XVIII century.

The capitalist mode of production

The basis of this mode of production is the relationship between wage labor and capital. Society, accordingly, is divided into two classes: the capitalists-owners of the means of production and money-capital, and the proletarians, who sell their labor power to the capitalists. At the same time, the concept of surplus value arises - it is the profit from production that the capitalists leave to themselves. The surplus value is in fact the driving force of capitalist society.

During the period of the capitalist mode of production, the productive forces received unprecedented development. The volume of production, the level of development of the instruments of labor have grown at times. At the same time, the main benefits from the growth of social production went mainly to the capitalists.

At a certain stage of this system, the productive forces must outgrow private capitalist production relations, which, in Marx's view, inevitably leads to the formation of the following stages in the development of society-socialism and communism.

Communist mode of production

Property becomes the whole of the whole people, and labor becomes a public one. At the same time, classness is preserved, since property is divided into state and collective-farm cooperative. Also, the problems of the division between manual labor and mental division remain unresolved, and the distribution of material wealth according to the work invested. The main psychological question of such a society is how to make labor a voluntary vital need of every person. Therefore, while the theory of Marx on the formation of a communist society remains a utopia. At the present time, we are seeing the beginnings of a socialist society in a number of capitalist countries. But more, as history has shown, it is too early to speak.