Relations of Production

By "relations of production" (German: Produktionsverhältnisse), 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 constitute a relatively stable and permanent structure, the "economic structure" or mode of production. A social relation can be defined, in the first instance, as a relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a group, or a relation between groups, or a relation between an individual and a group. The group could be an ethnic or kinship group, a social institution or organization, a social class, a nation, or gender, etc. A social relation is therefore not simply identical with an interpersonal relation or an individual relation, although all these types of relations presuppose each other. A socia…