In my reconstitution of the concept of a mode of production, I shall start with what seem the most external and formal determinations, and attempt to enrich them progressively. I shall therefore return to the first question of the theory of history, the question of the breaks, of the right break. Scattered throughout Marx’s writings is a series of comments with a common form: they all begin as follows: ‘What defines a historical epoch of production is …’ or again, ‘what defines a historical mode of production is the specific way in which it …’; then follow several phrases whose comparison is only too likely to be quite instructive, for they are all equivalent in principle, without this equivalence being at all tautological. In other words, we can try to extract from these equivalent answers to a single question which depends in principle on a method of comparison, the determination of the criteria for the identification of a ‘mode of production’ (for the moment this term is still no more than a name, as far as we are concerned, the name of the unit of periodization peculiar to Marx), the determination of the pertinent differences which make it possible to define the concept of each mode of production. If we do reveal such pertinent differences, we shall face a second task, that of characterizing the ensembles within which these differences act.1
(1) Mode of Production: Manner of Producing
Even more than its French or English equivalent, the German term Produktionsweise retains some echo of the simple and original meaning of the word Weise, mode, i.e., manner, way to do something (there is a standard German expression for this, the doublet Art und Weise). This warns us immediately what kind of analysis we are dealing with: a descriptive analysis which isolates forms or qualities. Thus the mode ‘of production’ first exists on the same plane as the many other modes we find in the course of an analysis of Capital. For example:
Modes of exchange: ‘[W]hat is emphasized in the categories money economy and credit economy, and stressed as the distinctive feature, is actually not the economy proper, i.e., the production process itself, but rather the mode of commerce between the various agents of production or producers’ (Verkehrsweise) (Capital, Vol. 2, pp. 195–6). Modes of circulation: ‘The quality that gives a part of the capital value spent on means of production the character of fixed capital, lies exclusively in the specific manner in which this value circulates. This particular manner of circulation (diese eigene Weise der Zirkulation) arises from the particular way in which the means of labour gives up its value to the product, or acts (sich … verhält) to form value during the production process. This in turn arises from the special way in which the means of labour function in the labour process (aus der besonderen Art der Funktion der Arbeitsmittel’ (Capital, Vol. 2, pp. 239–40). Modes of consumption: ‘[T]he number and extent of his so-called necessary requirements, as also the manner in which they are satisfied (die Art ihrer Befriedung), are themselves products of history’ (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 275).
I could give other examples, too, taken from the ‘economic’ sphere and elsewhere.
This descriptive and comparative character indicates that the expression ‘mode of production’ does not initially contain any reference to the breadth of its application other than in the form of a tendency towards generality: we find the capitalist mode of production, in the narrow sense of the industrial mode of production, the utilization of machinery, steadily extended to the various branches of industry:
But when surplus-value has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus labour, it by no means suffices for capital to take over the labour process in its given or historically transmitted shape, and then simply to prolong its duration. The technical and social conditions of the process and consequently the mode of production itself must be revolutionized before the productivity of labour can be increased. Then, with the increase in the productivity of labour, the value of labour-power will fall; and the portion of the working day necessary for the reproduction of that value will be shortened (Capital, Vol. 1, p. 432).
This text is preceded by the following definition:
An alteration in his tools or in his mode of working or both … must be revolutionized.
Here we have descriptions of processes, manners, methods, forms – all expressions which have meaning only by what they exclude. Firstly, quantitative measurements. Thus the productivity of labour, which determines the relative quantities necessary for the satisfaction of the producer’s needs and for surplus-value, only intervenes here in so far as it depends in each historical epoch on a certain form of the labour process, i.e., on the relationship between certain instruments (means of labour) and certain forms of labour organization (which include non-organizations, such as when the individual producer alone sets to work the tools which enable him to obtain an actual useful product). Then they exclude any consideration of the material nature of the objects which produce or undergo a transformation, in so far as such a consideration refers to the special features of branches of the social division of production which produce special use-values with peculiar technological characteristics. In this sense, Marx had already written in the 1857 Introduction that ‘political economy is not technology’ in the sense that the latter term had acquired at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and whose historical origins he reveals in the chapter in Volume One on large-scale industry. These two negative determinations are to be found in the text of the chapter on the labour process:
Relics of bygone instruments of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic formations of society as do fossil bones for the determination of extinct species of animals. It is not what is made but how (nicht was … sondern wie), and by what instruments of labour, that distinguishes different economic epochs. Instruments of labour not only supply a standard of the degree of development which human labour has attained, but they also indicate the social relations within which men work (nicht nur Gradmesser der Entwicklung der menschlichen Arbeitskraft, sondern auch Anzeiger der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen, worin gearbeitet wird) (Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 285–6).
If means of labour are to be ‘indicators’ of social relations, they must obviously be justifiable by a type of analysis different from the measurement of their effectivity or the technological description of their elements. Otherwise we should fall back into Proudhon’s error and take machines for social relations (cf. The Poverty of Philosophy, MECW 6, p. 183).
We can define this analysis as a differential determination of forms, and define a ‘mode’ as a system of forms which represents one state of the variation of the set of elements which necessarily enter into the process considered. This definition, which I am about to put to the test, is true for all modes, and on each occasion it requires two things: a listing of the places (or functions) which feature in the process concerned, and a determination of the pertinent criteria which enable us to distinguish between the forms occupying these places. Thus, if we return to the above-mentioned example of the mode of circulation (Capital, Vol. 2, pp. 239–40), we find that this criterion consists of the fact that it transmits its value to the product either in toto or only in parts spread over several periods of production. At the same time, we can derive from it the concepts by which Marx designates existence as an element of the process: function, factor. But in order to list these places we must refer to another ‘mode’, the ‘mode of production’ itself; we are not dealing with a relatively autonomous process with its own consistency. It is different with the mode of production itself, and there we find that consistency.
(2) The Elements of the System of Forms
In the case, therefore, of the mode of production (in the strict sense), we still have to identify these elements. Here we shall find it necessary to compare several of Marx’s texts which complement one another, and even to suggest interpretations of them whose well-foundedness will, I hope, emerge later in the paper. We find a first extremely clear text in Capital Volume Two:
Whatever the social form of production, workers and means of production always remain its factors (Faktoren). But if they are in a state of mutual separation, they are only potentially (der Möglichkeit nach) factors of production. For any production to take place, they must be connected (sich verbinden). The particular form and mode in which this connection is effected is what distinguishes the various economic epochs of the social structure (Vol. 2, p. 120).
Two of the elements we are seeking are indicated here:
(1) The worker (labour-power);
(2) The means of production.
The text goes on:
In the present case, the separation of the free worker from his means of production is the given starting-point, and we have seen how and under what conditions the two come to be united in the hands of the capitalist – i.e., as his capital in its productive mode of existence.
Here we find straightaway a third element which, like the other two, also deserves to be called a ‘factor’:
(3) The non-worker, appropriating surplus labour. Elsewhere, Marx describes him as the representative of the ‘class of large proprietors’ (Grossbesitzer-klasse – Capital, Vol. 1, p. 647). This is the capitalist. Besides this, we find here an element of a different kind which we could call a connection (relation) between the preceding elements: it can take two exclusive values: separation (Tennung)/property.
If we compare the results of our analysis of this text with a series of other texts, particularly those contained in Marx’s unpublished draft ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’ (op. cit.), and in the chapter in Volume Three of Capital on the ‘Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent’, we find the same elements and long descriptions of their combinations. The worker is specified as the direct producer; the property relation is itself specified according to several complex forms, notable the duality of ‘possession’ (use, enjoyment) and ‘property’ (property strictly speaking).
But the essential interest of these texts is that they oblige us to introduce into the structure a second connection distinct from the first, a second relation between the ‘factors’ of the combination. This is a very important point, for it governs our whole understanding of the structure. We must therefore try to define the nature of this connection very clearly, starting from Marx’s texts themselves. This connection corresponds to what Marx designates by various terms such as the real material appropriation of the means of production by the producer in the labour process (Aneignung, Appropriation, wirkliche Aneignung), or simply as the appropriation of nature by man. Two points must be clearly established:
(1) this connection is distinct from the preceding one;
(2) this, too, really is a connection, a relation between the previously listed elements.
The relative looseness of Marx’s vocabulary on this point in the texts I have mentioned (particularly ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’ makes it difficult to prove the first point. Marx uses a whole series of practically equivalent terms (Aneignung, Appropriation; Besitz, Benutzung, etc.) to describe all the connections between the producer and his means of production. This looseness depends in reality on the difficulty Marx felt in clearly thinking the distinction between the two connections, a difficulty I shall explain. Nevertheless, let us take the text of Volume One of Capital on absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value (Vol. 1, p. 291): there we find two uses of the word Aneignung (appropriation) less than two pages apart but with obviously different meanings corresponding to the two connections I have been discussing:
in der individuellen Aneignung von Naturgegenständen zu seinem Lebenszwecken kontrolliert er sich selbst. Später wird er kontrolliert (in the individual appropriation of natural objects the worker controls himself. Afterwards his labour is controlled by others);
die Aneignung dieser Mehrarbeit durch das Kapital (the appropriation of that surplus labour by capital).
The second ‘Aneignung’ describes a property relation, the one we first met. It describes one of the presuppositions of capitalist production: capital is the owner of all the means of production and of labour, and therefore it is the owner of the entire product.
But the first does not designate a property relation: it belongs to the analysis of what Marx called the ‘labour process’, or rather it situates the analysis of that labour process as part of the analysis of the mode of production. Nowhere in it does the capitalist intervene as an owner, but only the worker, the means of labour and the object of labour.
In the light of this distinction, we can now re-read for example the chapter on the labour process. Marx writes:
The labour process, when it is the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the worker works under the control of the capitalist … Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer (Vol. 1, p. 291).
In these ‘two phenomena’ characteristic of the capitalist mode of production, we find precisely the two connections in the specific form they take in the capitalist mode of production.
From the point of view of property, the labour process is an operation between things which the capitalist has purchased. ‘The product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar.’
In the capitalist mode of production, the labour process is such that individual labour does not set to work the society’s means of production, which are the only means of production able to function as such. Without the capitalist’s ‘control’, which is a technically indispensable moment of the labour process, labour does not possess the fitness (Zweckmässigkeit) it requires if it is to be social labour, i.e., labour used by society and recognized by it. The fitness peculiar to the capitalist mode of production implies the cooperation and division of the functions of control and execution. It is a form of the second connection I have discussed, which can now be defined as the direct producer’s ability to set to work the means of social production. In the pages of Capital, Marx defines several forms of this connection: the autonomy (Selbständigkeit) of the direct producer, and the forms of mutual dependence of the producers (co-operation, etc.).
We can already see that recognition of this second connection in its conceptual independence, in its difference from the ‘property’ connection (A), is the key to several very important theses of Capital. Notably the double function of the capitalist as the exploiter of labour-power (‘property’) and as the organizer of production (‘real appropriation’); a double function expounded by Marx in the chapters on co-operation, manufacture and large-scale industry (Volume One). This double function is an index of what I shall call the double nature of the division of labour in production (the ‘technical’ division of labour and the ‘social’ division of labour); at the same time, it is an index of the interdependence or intersection of these two divisions, which itself reflects the fact that the two connections which I have distinguished both belong to a single ‘Verbindung’, to a single combination, i.e., to the structure of a single mode of production.
That is why the distinction between these two connections finally enables us to understand what constitutes the complexity of the combination, the complexity which characterizes the Marxist totality as opposed to the Hegelian totality. When the concept of structural complexity was introduced,2 it was a question of the complexity of the social structure as a whole, in so far as several relatively autonomous levels were articulated in it. Now we find that production itself is a complex totality, i.e., that nowhere is there a simple totality, and we can give a precise meaning to this complexity: it consists of the fact that the elements of the totality are not linked together once, but twice, by two distinct connections. What Marx called a combination is not therefore a simple relationship between the ‘factors’ of any production, but the relationship between these two connections and their interdependence.
Finally, therefore, we can draw up a table of the elements of any mode of production, a table of the invariants in the analysis of forms:
(1) worker;
(2) means of production;
(i) object of labour;
(ii) means of labour;
(3) non-worker;
(A) property connection;
(B) real or material appropriation connection.
Marx’s difficulty in clearly distinguishing between the two connections in certain historically retrospective texts can be explained by the particular form these connections take in the capitalist mode of production. In the capitalist mode of production, both connections can indeed be characterized by a ‘separation’: the worker is ‘separated’ from all the means of production, he is stripped of all property (save that of his labour-power); but at the same time, as a human individual, the worker is ‘separated’ from any ability to set in motion the instruments of social labour by himself; he has lost his craft skill, which no longer corresponds to the means of labour; as Marx says, the labour is no longer ‘his property’. In the capitalist mode of production, strictly speaking, these two ‘separations’, these two distinctions overlap and coincide in the image of the opposition between the ‘free’ worker and the means of production instituted as capital, to the extent that the worker himself becomes an element of capital: that is why Marx constantly confounds them in a single concept, the concept of the separation of the worker from his condition of labour. Now in all the historical inquiries which trace the history of the constitution of the elements of the capitalist mode of production back to earlier modes of production, Marx takes this concept as his guiding thread. This explains his difficulty, a difficulty which is patent in the semantic hesitations of ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’, in isolating the two connections; for the homology between the two connections, the overlap between their forms, which characterizes the capitalist structure, does not so characterize those earlier modes of production. Marx only finds it again in the hypothetical ‘natural community’ which inaugurates history: then the form of each of the two connections was, on the contrary, the union, the belonging together of the worker and the means of production: on the one hand the almost biological collective property of the land, on the other the biological naturalness of the labour (the earth as ‘man’s laboratory’, indistinctly object and means of labour).
But the entire difficulty, and any looseness in Marx’s terminology, disappear once our analysis deals with the effects of this double articulation of the mode of production, i.e., with the double nature of the ‘immediate production process’ as a labour process and (in its capitalist form) as a process of self-expansion or valorization (Verwertung) of value (the distinction between these two constitutes the object of Volume One, Chapter 7).
By varying the combination of these elements according to the two connections which are part of the structure of every mode of production, we can therefore reconstitute the various modes of production, i.e., we can set out the ‘presuppositions’ for the theoretical knowledge of them, which are quite simply the concepts of the conditions of their historical existence. In this way, we can even to a certain extent generate modes of production which have never existed in an independent form, and which do not therefore strictly speaking form part of our ‘periodization’ – modes of production such as Marx called the ‘mode of commodity production’ (the union of individual small producers owning their own means of production and setting them to work without co-operation); or modes of production for which it is only possible to foresee the general conditions, such as the socialist mode of production. The final result would be a comparative table of the forms of different modes of production which all combine the same ‘factors’.
However, this is by no means a combinatory in the strict sense, i.e., a form of combination in which only the places of the factors and their relations change, but not their nature. Before we go on to prove this in a second section, we can nevertheless draw from what has already been established a number of conclusions as to the nature of the ‘determination in the last instance’ of the social structure by the form of the production process; which amounts to a justification of what I announced when I referred to the Preface to A Contribution: that the new principle of periodization proposed by Marx contained a complete transformation of the historian’s problematic.
(3) Determination in the Last Instance
By a double necessity, the capitalist mode of production is both the mode of production in which the economy is most easily recognized as the ‘motor’ of history, and the mode of production in which the essence of this ‘economy’ is unrecognized in principle (in what Marx calls ‘fetishism’). That is why the first explanations of the problem of the ‘determination in the last instance by the economy’ that we find in Marx are directly linked to the problem of fetishism. They occur in the texts in Capital on the ‘fetishism of commodities’ (Vol. 1, pp. 169–72), on the ‘genesis of capitalist ground-rent’ (Vol. 3, pp. 917–50) and on the ‘trinity formula’ (Vol. 3, pp. 953–70), where Marx replaces the false conception of this ‘economy’ as a relation between things by its true definition as a system of social relations. At the same time, he presents the idea that the capitalist mode of production is the only one in which exploitation (the extortion of surplus-value), i.e., the specific form of the social relation that binds classes together in production, is ‘mystified’, ‘fetishized’ into the form of a relation between the things themselves. This thesis follows directly from his proof where the commodity is concerned: the social relation which constitutes its reality, knowledge of which enables us to assess its fetishism, is precisely the commodity relation as a relation of production, i.e., the commodity relation as generalized by the capitalist mode of production. A social (‘human’) relation cannot therefore be found behind ‘things’ in general, but only behind the thing of this capitalist relation.3
At this point there is a refutation of an objection raised against the general thesis of the Preface to A Contribution, which introduces the general idea of determination in the last instance. We shall only find this refutation intelligible if we constantly think the ‘economy’ as the structure of relations that I have defined:
[According to these objections:] My view … that ‘the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life’ … is all very true for our own times, in which material interests are preponderant, but not for the Middle Ages, dominated by Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, dominated by politics. In the first place, it strikes us as odd that anyone should suppose that these well-worn phrases about the Middle Ages and the ancient world were unknown to anyone else. One thing is clear: the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood which explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part. For the rest, one needs no more than a slight acquaintance with, for example, the history of the Roman Republic, to be aware that its secret history is the history of landed property. And then there is Don Quixote, who long ago paid the penalty for wrongly imagining that knight errantry was compatible with all economic forms of society (Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 175–6 n35).
We can therefore first make a specification that can be added to those that the preceding papers have proposed with respect to fetishism: Marx’s thesis does not mean that in modes of production other than capitalism the structure of the social relations is transparent to the agents. ‘Fetishism’ is not absent from them, but displaced (onto Catholicism, politics, etc.). In reality certain of Marx’s formulations leave no doubt on this point. For example, at the beginning of the text on ‘Forms Which Precede Capitalist Production’, Marx writes about the so-called ‘primitive’ community:
The earth is the great workshop, the arsenal which furnishes both means and material of labour, as well as the seat, the base of the community. They relate naively to it as the property of the community, of the community producing and reproducing itself in living labour. Each individual conducts himself only as a link, as a member of this community as proprietor or possessor. The real appropriation through the labour process happens under these presuppositions, which are not themselves the product of labour, but appear as its natural or divine presuppositions (Grundrisse, p. 472).
In other words, the transparency which characterizes the relation between the direct producer and his product in non-commodity modes of production has as its counterpart this specific form of ‘naivety’ in which the existence of a community, i.e., certain kinship relations and forms of political organization, can appear as ‘natural or divine’ and not as implied by the structure of a particular mode of production.
But this point, which Marx touches on only too briefly (for lack of historical material), is in principle quite clearly linked to the problem of determination in the last instance. Indeed, it emerges that the ‘mystification’ applies not to the economy (the mode of material production) as such, but precisely to that instance of the social structure which, according to the nature of the mode of production, is determined as occupying the place of determination, the place of the last instance.
We can now understand why analogous causes produce analogous effects here: in the event, it is possible to give this formulation a precise sense; that is to say, whenever the place of determination is occupied by a single instance, the relationship of the agents will reveal phenomena analogous to ‘fetishism’. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that this is the sense of the following passage from the ‘Forms’ on the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production:
[I]n most of the Asiatic land-forms, the comprehensive unity standing above all these little communities appears as the higher proprietor or as the sole proprietor; the real communities hence only as hereditary possessors. Because this unity is the real proprietor and the real presupposition of communal property, it follows that this unity can appear as a particular entity above the many real particular communities, where the individual is then in fact property-less, or, property … appears mediated for him through a cession by the total unity – a unity realized in the form of the despot, the father of the many communities – to the individual, through the mediation of the particular commune. The surplus product – which is, incidentally, determined by law in consequence of the real appropriation through labour – thereby automatically (von sich selbst) belongs to this highest unity (Grundrisse, pp. 472–3).
This ‘automatically’ must be taken in the strongest sense, noting that in other modes of production, e.g., the feudal mode of production, the surplus product does not ‘automatically’ belong to the representatives of the ruling class. As we shall see, something further is explicitly required for the feudal mode of production: a political relationship, either in the ‘pure’ form of violence, or in the adapted and improved forms of law. In the ‘Asiatic’ mode of production and the capitalist mode of production, on the contrary, two modes of production as far apart chronologically, geographically, etc., as possible, and despite the fact that the agents who enter into the relationship are different in other respects (here capitalist and wage-worker, there state and communities), the same direct determination by the functions of the process of production produces the same effects of fetishism: the product belongs ‘of itself’ to this higher ‘unity’ because it appears to be the work of that unity. This is what Marx writes a little further on in the same text:
The communal conditions of real appropriation through labour, aqueducts, very important among the Asiatic peoples; means of communication etc. then appear as the work of the higher unity – of the despotic regime hovering over the little communes (ibid., pp. 473–4).
This reasoning recurs in the chapter in Capital on co-operation, where Marx systematically compares the Asiatic forms of despotism with capitalist forms of ‘despotism’, i.e., the joining of the function of control or direction, indispensable to the performance of the labour process (the real appropriation of the object of labour), with the function of ownership of the means of production:
Because [the socially productive power of labour] costs capital nothing, while on the other hand it is not developed by the worker until his labour itself belongs to capital, it appears as a power which capital possesses by its nature – a productive power inherent in capital.
The colossal effects of simple co-operation are to be seen in the gigantic structures erected by the ancient Asiatics, Egyptians, Etruscans, etc … This power of Asiatic and Egyptian kinds, of Etruscan theocrats, etc. has in modern society been transferred to the capitalist, whether he appears as an isolated individual or, as in the case of joint-stock companies, in combination with others (Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 451–2).
It would therefore be possible and legitimate to look in Asiatic despotism for an analogy to the forms of appearance which mean that in the capitalist mode of production, ‘all faculties of labour are projected as faculties of capital, just as all forms of commodity value are projected as forms of money’ (Capital). We should then in fact be basing ourselves on the analogy of the relations between the two connections with the ‘combination’ in these two modes of production, i.e., on the analogy of the articulation of the double division of labour (see above).
But above all, these texts imply that all the levels of the social structure have the structure of a ‘mode’ in the sense in which I have analysed the mode of production strictly speaking. In other words, they are themselves presented in the form of specific complex combinations (Verbindungen). They therefore imply specific social relations, which are no more patterns of the inter-subjectivity of the agents than are the social relations of production, but depend on functions of the process concerned: in this sense, I shall be rigorous in speaking of political social relations or ideological social relations. In the analysis of each of these modes of combination, I shall appeal to criteria of pertinence specific to each occasion.
The problem which I wish to approach is therefore the following: how is the determinant instance in the social structure in a given epoch itself determined, i.e., how does a specific mode of combination of the elements constituting the structure of the mode of production determine the place of determination in the last instance in the social structure, i.e., how does a specific mode of production determine the relations between the various instances of the structure, i.e., ultimately, the articulation of that structure? (What Althusser has called the matrix role of the mode of production.)
In order to answer this question, at least in principle, I shall consider, not an ideal, but a reduced case: that of a social structure reduced to the articulation of two different instances, an ‘economic’ instance and a ‘political’ instance, which will enable me to follow closely certain passages where Marx compares, vis-à-vis ground-rent, the feudal mode of production with the capitalist mode of production.
On the simplest form of feudal ground-rent, labour rent (corvée), Marx writes:
It is clear, too, that in all forms where the actual worker himself remains the ‘possessor’ of the means of production and the conditions of labour needed for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must appear at the same time as a direct relation of domination and servitude (als unmittelbares Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis), and the direct producer therefore as an unfree person – an unfreedom (Unfreiheit) which may undergo a progressive attenuation from serfdom with statute-labour down to a mere tribute obligation. The direct producer in this case is by our assumption in possession of his own means of production, the objective conditions needed for the realization of his labour and the production of his means of subsistence; he pursues his agriculture independently, as well as the rural-domestic industry associated with it … Under these conditions, the surplus labour for the nominal landowner can only be extorted from them by extra-economic compulsion, whatever the form this might assume … Relations of personal dependence are therefore necessary, in other words personal unfreedom, to whatever degree, and being chained to the land as its accessory (Zubehör) – bondage in the true sense …
The specific economic form in which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers determines the relationship of domination and servitude, as this grows directly out of production itself reacts back on it as a determinant. On this is based the entire configuration of the economic community arising from the actual relations of production, and hence also its specific political form. It is in each case the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the immediate producers … in which we find the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social edifice, and hence also the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence (Souveränitäts- und Abhängigkeitsverhältnis), in short, the specific form of state in each case …
As far as labour rent goes, the most simple and primitive form of rent, this much is clear. Here rent is the original form of surplus-value and coincides with it. But it needs no further analysis here that surplus-value coincides with the unpaid labour of others, since this still exists in its visible, palpable form, the labour of the direct producer for himself being still separate both in time and space from his work for the landlord, with the latter appearing directly in the brutal form of forced labour for a third party (Capital, Vol. 3, pp. 926–8).
This text contains four major points (I shall take them in a different order):
– a new formulation of the principle of periodization: ‘what distinguishes one historical epoch from another’. Here it is the mode of dependence of the social structure with respect to the mode of production, i.e., the mode of articulation of the social structure, which Marx gives us as equivalent to the previous determinations, from the point of view of its concept;
– the specific difference in the relation between labour and surplus labour implied by the difference between the social relations in the feudal mode of production and in the capitalist mode of production (property/possession of the means of production): in the latter case there is a coincidence ‘in space and time’, simultaneously of labour and surplus labour, but not in the former;
– the non-coincidence of the two processes, the labour process and the surplus labour process, requires ‘extra-economic compulsion’ if surplus labour is actually to be carried out;
– this extra-economic compulsion takes the form of the feudal relationship of domination and servitude.
It seems to me that several conclusions follow.
Firstly, Marx tells us that surplus-value exists in its visible, palpable form (in sichtbarer, handgreiflicher Form existiert) in this mode of production, although surplus-value can only be recognized in its essence in the capitalist mode of production where it is hidden and therefore needs to be ‘analysed’. Surplus-value is par excellence a category of the capitalist mode of production which takes its meaning from the analysis of the ‘valorization process’ (Verwertungsprozess), i.e., of a production process whose aim is an increase in exchange-value (the latter, by the same token, being generalized as a form of value).
The justification for this statement is the fact that surplus-value is not a ‘form’ in the same way that profit, rent and interest are; surplus-value is no more nor less than surplus labour. The specific mode of exploitation of this surplus labour in capitalist production, i.e., ultimately the mode of constitution of revenues (the mode of distribution), and therefore of classes, is the constitution of profit, interest and capitalist rent, i.e., of what Marx calls the ‘transformed forms’ of surplus-value. In the capitalist mode of production, the forms of class struggle are first inscribed in the forms of the production process in general, they appear as a confrontation of forces within certain limits which are directly determined in the production process and analysable in it (limits of the working day, of wages, of profit and its subdivisions).
In other words, if we inquire about the structure of the class relations in a given society of which we have already said that it was distinguished by a certain mode of extraction of surplus-value, we are inquiring first of all about the ‘transformed forms’ peculiar to that society.4
But it is no accident that the point which this passage singles out as the characteristic difference between the feudal mode of production and the capitalist mode of production – the coincidence or non-coincidence of necessary labour and surplus labour – is also the essential point of the whole of Marx’s analysis in Capital of the capitalist mode of production alone: this coincidence is another way of expressing the term-by-term coincidence of the labour process and the valorization process. The distinction between constant capital and variable capital which defines the valorization process will always be found to correspond to the distinction between labour-power and means of production peculiar to the labour process. Many examples from Capital could be adduced to show how the analysis demands reference to this correspondence (notably in the whole analysis of turnover). The worker’s labour materially transforms raw materials into a product by setting to work the means of production; the same labour transfers to the product the value of the means of production and materials consumed, and produces a new value, part – but only part – of which is equal to the value of the labour-power. In the last analysis, therefore, the dual character of the production process, which expresses this coincidence, refers to the dual character of ‘living’ labour.
It is easy to see that in the case Marx is describing here, the case of a form of feudal production, the coincidence exists in neither of the two forms: not only are labour and surplus labour distinct ‘in time and space’, but even given a retrospective projection of the category of value, neither of the terms can strictly speaking be called a process of valorization.
In other words:
– in the capitalist mode of production, the two processes coincide ‘in time and space’, which is an intrinsic feature of the mode of production (of the economic instance); this coincidence is itself the effect of the form of combination of the factors of the production process peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, i.e., of the form of the two relations of property and real appropriation. The corresponding ‘transformed forms’ in this social structure, i.e., the forms of the relations between classes, are then directly economic forms (profit, rent, wages, interest), which implies notably that the state does not intervene in them at this level.
– in the feudal mode of production there is a disjunction between the two processes ‘in time and space’, which is always an intrinsic feature of the mode of production (of the economic instance) and an effect of the form of combination peculiar to it (the property relation appears in it in the dual form of ‘possession’ and ‘property’). Surplus labour cannot then be extorted without ‘extra-economic compulsion’, i.e., without ‘Herrschafts-und Knechtschaftsverhältnis’. Even before we have analysed the ‘transformed forms’ for themselves, we can conclude that in the feudal mode of production they will not be the transformed forms of the economic base alone, but of the ‘Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis’. Not directly economic, but directly and indissolubly political and economic;5 which means, finally, that different modes of production do not combine homogeneous elements, and do not allow differential divisions and definitions like the ‘economic’, the ‘legal’ and the ‘political’. Historians and ethnologists today often attest the discovery of this effect, though usually in a theoretically blind fashion.
We may also be able to understand why this politics was not conscious as such, why it did not think its relative autonomy, even at the moment when it occupied the determinant place, either in the form of ‘pure’ violence, or in the forms of a law, because it emerged as one of the presuppositions of the mode of production itself. Indeed, as we know, this relative autonomy of politics was not recognized in thought until much later: it is peculiarly a ‘bourgeois’ thought.
I think that it is possible to draw from this, one of Marx’s most detailed texts, the principle explicitly present in Marx of a definition of the determination in the last instance of the economy. In different structures, the economy is determinant in that it determines which of the instances of the social structure occupies the determinant place. Not a simple relation, but rather a relation between relations; not a transitive causality, but rather a structural causality. In the capitalist mode of production it happens that this place is occupied by the economy itself; but in each mode of production, the ‘transformation’ must be analysed. Here I merely suggest that we could try to re-read the first pages of The Origins of the Family in this perspective, the pages in which Engels expresses the following notion which he presents as a mere ‘correction’ of Marx’s general formulations:
According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of material life. But this itself is of a two-fold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the implements required for this; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are determined by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour, on the one hand, and of the family, on the other. The less labour is developed … the more predominantly the social order appears to be dominated by ties of kinship (MECW 26, pp. 131–2).
A surprising text, which not only plays shamelessly on the term production, but demands the application of the technological model of the advance of the productive forces to the forms of kinship, presented as social relations of procreation! Perhaps it would be more worthwhile, as a number of Marxist anthropologists have been attempting, to show how, in certain ‘primitive’ or ‘self-subsistent’ societies, the mode of production determines a certain articulation of the social structure in which the kinship relations determine even the forms of transformation of the economic base.6