ABSTRACT
Marx defined the production mode as a combination of given productive forces and the relations of production existing between them. The more we go back into history, he wrote, the more clearly we will see man as part of a greater whole: the family first, the clan later on and, subsequently, the various forms of communal society. The standpoint of the isolated individual acquired relevance no earlier than the eighteenth century, the time when social relations reached an acme. This means that man is a gregarious animal and, as such, carries on social production activities whose laws are summed up in this well-known passage: “In the real production of their existence men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which arises a legal and political superstructure, and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness…. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with existing relations or production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution” (Marx 1859a, p. 263).
