Mode of Production Bob Jessop The published version can be found here: ‘Mode of Production’, J. Eatwell, M. Milgate, and P. Newton, eds., Marxian Economics, London: Macmillan, 289-96, 1990. ________________________________________________________________________ This concept was first introduced by Karl Marx in his efforts to theorize the overall structure and dynamic of capitalism. It has since been widely used, mainly in Marxist political economy and historical studies, to analyse various economic systems. Although there is broad agreement on its general field of application, different approaches exist towards defining and distinguishing particular modes of production. Some of the resulting problems are considered below. Marx used the concept of mode of production in two main ways; to analyse the economic base and to describe the overall structure of societies. Thus he employed it to specify the particular combination of forces and relations of production which distinguished one form of labour process and its corresponding form of economic exploitation from another. He also employed it to characterize the overall pattern of social reproduction arising from the relations between the economic base (comprising production, exchange, distribution and consumption) and the legal, political, social and ideological institutions of the so-called superstructure. The latter usage is particularly problematic. Its conceptual basis is fuzzy and it encourages monocausal economic analyses of whole societies. But even the more rigorously defined and carefully theorized analysis of production proper involves problems. For Marx concentrated on the capitalist mode of production, discussed it in relatively abstract terms, and considered pre-capitalist modes largely in terms of their differences from capitalism. Many of these ambiguities and lacunae survive today so that the meaning and scope of the concept are still contested. Mode of Production Defined. Marx analysed modes of production in terms of the specific economic form in which the owners of the means of production extracted unpaid surplus labour from the direct producers. For him this form always corresponded to a definite stage of development of the methods of labour and their social productivity. He also described this economic form as ‘the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure’ (Capital, III, ch. 47, sect. II). For it provides ‘the real foundation on which rise 1