Concept

Relations of production

Overview

Relations of production (German: Produktionsverhältnisse) is a concept frequently used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their theory of historical materialism and in Das Kapital. It is first explicitly used in Marx's published book The Poverty of Philosophy, although Marx and Engels had already defined the term in The German Ideology which was only published posthumously in 1932.

Some social relations are voluntary or freely chosen (i.e. a person 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 part of a family (i.e. biosocial kinship) a group, an organization, a community, a nation, etc.

By "relations of production", Marx and Engels meant the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order 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, along with the forces of production, constitute a relatively stable and permanent structure, the "economic superstructure" or mode of production.

The term "relations of production" is somewhat vague, for two main reasons:

The German word Verhältnis can mean "relation", "proportion", or "ratio". Thus, the relationships could be qualitative, quantitative, or both. Which meaning applies can only be established from the context.

The relations to which Marx refers can be social relationships, economic relationships, or technological relationships.

Marx and Engels typically use the term to refer to the socioeconomic relationships characteristic of a specific epoch; for example: a capitalist's exclusive relationship to a capital good, and a wage worker's consequent relation to the capitalist; a feudal lord's relationship to a fief, and the serf's consequent relation 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.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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1. But when once their nature is understood, they can, in the hands of the producers working together, be transformed from master demons into willing servants. The difference is as that between the destructive force of electricity in the lightning of the storm, and electricity under command in the telegraph and the voltaic arc; the difference between a conflagration, and fire…

   Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific

   States what Relations of production is; the author is tied to Relations of production in the knowledge graph.

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2. The fate of the products becomes still more uncertain. The number of merchants is great and one does not know what the other is doing. The products now pass not only from hand to hand, but also from market to market. The producers have lost the control of the aggregate production in their sphere of life, and the merchants have not yet acquired this control. Products and production become the victims of chance. But…

   Friedrich Engels, The origin of the family, private property, and the state

   States what Relations of production is; the author is tied to Relations of production in the knowledge graph.

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3. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois methods of production as so many epochs in the progress of the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production―antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from conditions surrounding the life of…

   Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy

   States what Relations of production is; names Relations of production several times.

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Philosophers who discussed Relations of production

• Karl Marx
• Louis Althusser
• Friedrich Pollock

Related ideas

• Vladimir Lenin
• Productive forces
• Imperialism
• Karl Marx
• James Mill
• Capital (economics)
• Max Weber
• Social relation
• Nation
• Sovereign state
• Property
• Kinship
• Social class
• Institution
• Gender
• Working class
• The German Ideology
• Marxian economics
• Grundrisse
• Historical materialism
• Friedrich Engels
• Means of production
• Bourgeoisie
• Economy

Opposing perspectives

• Social class
• Social ownership

Place in the tradition

Part of Communism.

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