Marx views human society as an interrelated whole. The social groups, institutions, beliefs and doctrines within it are integrally related. Aspects of society such as history, politics, laws, religion or for that matter education cannot be treated as separate spheres.

According to Marx, every society has its infrastructure and superstructure. Social relations are defined in terms of material conditions, which he calls infrastructure. The economic base of a society forms its infrastructure. Any changes in material conditions also imply corresponding changes in social relations. Forces and relations of production come in the category of infrastructure. Within the superstructure figure the legal, educational and political institutions as well as values, cultural ways of thinking, religion, ideologies and philosophies.

While coming to these conclusions, Marx proceeds from the very beginning of human history. He says, in order to survive people need food, clothing, shelter and other necessities of life. They produce material goods from objects found in nature. Material production has always been the basis of human existence. For Karl Marx, the history of human societies is the story of how people relate to one another in their efforts to survive. He said,

“The first historical act is the production of material life. This is indeed a historical act, a fundamental condition of all history”.

According to Marx, economic production or production of material life is the starting point from which society as an inter-related whole is structured.

Forces of Production

According to Marx the forces of production are the ways in which material goods are produced. They include the technological know-how, the types of equipment in use and goods being produced for example, tools, machinery, labour and the levels of technology are all considered to be the forces of production. The forces of production, according to Marx include Means of production and Labour power. Which includes means of production (tools, machines, factories and so on), and labour power (the skills, knowledge, experience, and other human facilities used in work).

The development of machinery, changes in the labour process, the opening up of new sources of energy and the education of the workers are included in the forces of production. In this sense science and the related skills can be seen as part of the productive forces. Some Marxists have even included geographical or ecological space as a productive force.

The forces of production express the degree to which human beings control nature. The more advanced the productive forces are, greater is their control over the nature and vice versa.

1. Productive forces transform nature into use values and exchange values. The productive forces compel the creation and destruction of successive systems of production relations between men.
2. Productive forces have an intrinsic tendency to develop, as human being’s knowledge and mastery over nature increase. As these forces develop, successive social relations of production develop and consequently give way. At a particular point of development the productive forces and the production relations enter into conflict: the later being unstable to contain the former. Society then enters a period of revolution.
3. Different socio-economic organizations of production, which have characterized human history, arise or fall as they enable or impede the expansion of society’s productive capacity. The growth of the productive forces thus explains the general course of human history.
4.   In every social order there is a continuous change in the material forces of production. Sometimes, as in tribal societies, this change is produced by some natural and ecological phenomena, such as the drying up of river, deforestation in or exhaustion of the soil etc. Usually, however, this change is produced by a development in the instruments of production. The development of forces of production reflects the constant struggle of human beings to master nature through their labour.
5.  Involuntary changes in technology, demography, and ecology or in ‘material life’ affect the mode of production itself and perceptibly alter the balance of productive relations. But involuntary changes do not spontaneously restructure or reorganize a mode of production. Any restructuring of relations of power, forms of domination and of social organisation has been mostly the outcome of struggles. The condition and character of the struggle are determined by changes in material life.
6.  The development of the forces of production is primary because it results from a factor, which is, in a sense, exogenous. The motive force, which lies outside the forces and relations of production and acts first upon the former. The motive force is the relation and ever-present impulse of human beings to try to better their situation and overcome scarcity by developing the productive forces. Man is above all an animal that produces in society by acting upon nature through labour.

Relations of Production

The forces of production are not only factors in material production. According to Marx, in order to produce, people enter into definite relations with one another. People are able to produce only jointly by organizing in a society therefore labour is and always has been social in character. The relations of production are the social relations found among the people involved in the process of production. These relations are of two broad types.

• Relation of domination and subordination

It refers to those technical relations that are necessary for the actual production process of proceed. As such they include both the relations between the direct producers or workers and their employers or those who control their labour, and the relations between the direct producers themselves. According to Marx, the employer’s relation to the worker is one of domination and the worker’s relation with co-workers is one of cooperation. These are relations between people and people.

• Ownership and non ownership

It refers to the relations of economic control, which are legally manifested as property ownership. They govern access to the forces and products of production. These social relations are determined by the level and character of the development of productive forces. These are relations between people and things.

Relations of production are reflected in the economic ownership of productive forces. For example, under capitalism the most fundamental of thee relations are the bourgeoisie’s ownership of means of production while the proletariat owns only its labour power.

1.  ‘Forces’ and ‘relations’ of production are strongly interrelated. The development of one leads to a growing incompatibility or contradiction with the other. In fact, the contradictions between the two aspects of production ‘act as the motor of history’. The chain of causation in historical development of society runs like this. The forces of production determine the superstructure. There is, however, quite a good deal of controversy regarding the primacy of the forces of production over the relations of production. In Marx’s own writings, there is ambiguity on this matter. In places, he gives primacy to the relations of production while in other places he describes forces of production as the prime mover of social change.
2. The relations of production can influence the momentum and direct of the development of the productive forces.
3. The relationships of production can also dominate and generate changes in the forces. For example capitalist relations of production often do revolutionize the instruments of production and the labour process.
4. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production. The contradiction between forces and relations of production accounts for history existing as a succession of modes of production. The contradiction leads to the necessary decline of one mode and its replacement by another.

Modes of production

The forces and relation of production are two aspects of mode of production. Any forcess and relation of production, in any mode of production underline not just the progress, but also a movement of the whole of society from one stage to another.

Any historical mode of production is an integral unity between the forces of production and the relations of production. The forces of production shape the relations of production and the two together define the mode of production. In Marx’s writing, stages of social history are differentiated not by what human beings produce but by how, or by what means, they produce and material goods for subsistence. In this way, we can say that historical periods are founded and differentiated on the basis of the modes of material production. In this sense, the successive modes of production are the basic element of a systematic description of history.

The crucial element in defining mode of production is ‘that way in which the surplus is produced and its use controlled’. According to Marx, under capitalist mode of production, the surplus takes the form of profit. Surplus is produced by exploiting the working class and is sold for more than the wages given to the workers. Because production of surplus enables societies to grow and change, this factor is taken to be most important in defining mode of production. Each mode of production has its specific relations of production. These are not developed by chance or by accident. They are deliberately ordered because they help the property owning class extract the surplus from the working people. Take an example. The relations of production under feudalism, in which the serf is dominated in all respects by the feudal lord, are necessary to enable the feudal lord to appropriate the surplus from the serf. If such a relationship is continued under capitalism it will fail. Therefore a new set of production relations develops under capitalism that enables the capitalist appropriate surplus value from the workers.

Neither the forces of production nor the relations of production are fixed and static. Even within a given mode of production the forces of production may change. In any society, we may find that over the years greater production follows improvements in technology. The capitalist nations are very different from what they were to hundred years ago, when capitalism was born. This change in the productive forces has resulted in changes in the relations of production. The workers, today, may not be as exploited a factory workers as hundred years earlier. Marxists would, however, argue that exploitation still remains, because the modern worker, with modern technology, produces more surplus value than his predecessors, and he does not proportionately earn that much more. Marxian theory of Historical Materialism, Alienation and Class struggle explain various aspects of mode of production. He also calls mode of production as social formation in his various writings