Set of social relations that shape production, make up the economic structure of society and correspond to a definite stage of development of the productive forces.
Mode of production and historical transformation
The discovery of the concept of "mode of production" lies at the very origin of historical materialism. The "mode of production of material life" is a structure of social relations that:
- defines a society in accordance with the development of its productive forces,
- limits its forms of self-consciousness and
- shapes its possibilities of evolution and of revolutionary supersession by the new mode of production latent in the objectives of its revolutionary class.
In the social production of their existence, men enter into definite, necessary relations, independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces.
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 social forms of consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the process of social, political and intellectual life in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines reality; on the contrary, it is social reality that determines their consciousness.
In the course of their development, the productive forces of society come into contradiction with the existing relations of production or - what is but a legal expression of the same thing - with the property relations within which they had moved until then. From forms of development of the productive forces, these relations turn into fetters on those forces. Then begins an era of social revolution. The change that has taken place in the economic foundation more or less slowly or rapidly transforms the whole immense superstructure. […]
No society ever disappears before all the productive forces it can contain have developed, and new, higher relations of production never appear in it before the material conditions of their existence have matured within the very womb of the old society. Therefore mankind only ever sets itself such problems as it can solve, since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the problem itself arises only when the material conditions for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.
In broad outline, the Asiatic, ancient, feudal and modern bourgeois modes of production may be designated as so many progressive epochs in 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 an antagonism arising from the social conditions of existence of individuals; the productive forces developing within bourgeois society create at the same time the material conditions for the resolution of this antagonism. With this social formation, therefore, the prehistory of human society comes to an end.
Karl Marx. Preface to "A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy", January 1859.