Mode of Production in Marxism

Key Takeaways

History and Overview

In Marxism, as well as more current anthropological studies of economic life, the term mode of production describes the social relations through which human labor is used to transform energy from nature into usable products using tools, skills, organization, and knowledge.

The first person to use the term mode of production was the anthropologist Eric Wolf, who was influenced heavily by Marx.

In his sardonically titled book, Europe and the People without History (1982), Wolf traced post-Columbian Europe’s global influence. He showed how colonization transformed distant societies.

Marx explained history differently. He treated a society’s mode of production as its economic base, which shapes politics, laws, and ideas — its superstructure.

Wolf took this logic outside Europe. He used it to compare economic systems across all of human history.

Marxian anthropologists still use the concept this way. It explains why people in different social positions see their society differently.

This is historical materialism: the idea that economic organization shapes a society’s politics, law, and ideas (Engels, 1974).

Relations and Forces of Production

Scholars have identified anywhere between three and six modes of production.

In Europe and the People without History, Wolf focuses on three modes of production that interacted across the world after 1400.

These are kinship, tributary, and capitalist production (Wolf, 1982).

A mode of production is the way the relations between owners and non-owners of the means of production are organized, together with the forces of production themselves.

This distinguishes one society from another. In Marxist terms, it is central to understanding a society’s nature.

Each of these modes of production has two components: the means or forces of production (labor, instruments, and raw material) and the relations of production (Jessop, 1990).

Forces of Production

The means of production, also called the forces of production, are all of the knowledge and materials used in production besides human labor. These means can change. They evolve with a society’s scientific and technical knowledge.

A concrete example helps here. In medieval England, a farming community’s forces of production were fixed: land, simple hand tools, draught animals, and physical labor. There was no machinery.

Relations of Production

Relations of production are the limited set of roles people occupy when they take part in production. Each role carries its own rights and duties.

The relations organizing that same land, however, were not fixed by the technology at all. A customary bond required an unfree peasant to work a lord’s land for a set number of days each week.

He kept access to a strip of land in exchange. He did not own it outright.

Swap the lord-and-serf bond for a landlord renting to a cash-paying tenant, or a state assigning land-use rights instead. The forces of production could stay almost unchanged.

Yet the relations of production would shift completely.

Marxist theory treats the two components as analytically separable, even though they always appear together in practice. Technology sets what is possible. Relations of production decide who benefits.

Capitalists and workers interact at the group level, not the individual level. Marxist theory holds these relations to be antagonistic.

Marxian anthropologists use relations of production as their basic unit of analysis.

Domestic or Kinship Production

The domestic, or kin-ordered, mode of production most often describes the lives of foragers and small-scale subsistence farmers.

Marshall Sahlins gave this arrangement its most influential theory. The household, he said, is the basic economic unit. It produces and consumes together, not for profit. This differs sharply from capitalism’s profit-seeking logic (Sahlins, 1972).

These societies are more egalitarian than other modes. Even so, age and gender still shape who holds power.

The kinship mode links people who are alike, even without genetic ties. It places people, born or recruited, into social relations. This lets some organize others’ labor to survive.

Labor is organized through kinship, not markets. Farmers grow food for their own family. They rarely produce it to sell.

Examples of Kinship Production

In one family system, the men clear the fields. The whole family then plants seeds together. Children protect the crops. Men weed and harvest before the women dry and store the corn.

Mothers and daughters grind the corn. They use it to cook each family meal (Gates, 1996).

Foraging societies show a similar pattern. Resources are owned collectively, and shared. Among the Namibian Dobe Ju, small groups divide labor by gender — women forage, men hunt.

The resulting food is pooled and redistributed between family groups. These roles are not rigid, though: women may kill animals, and men may gather plants (Gates, 1996).

Tributary Production (Feudalism)

The tributary mode of production exists in social systems divided into classes of rulers and subjects. These subjects, such as farmers or shepherds, produce for themselves and their families while also giving a share of their goods or labor to their rulers.

This mode of production characterizes many pre-capitalist societies. Historians often label it feudalism after the fact.

Scholars trace tributary modes to three sources. These are chiefdoms (from the kinship system), agriculture, and warfare.

In feudal societies, for example, the aristocracy did not control the forces of production directly; these remained in the hands of the peasantry. But through its monopoly on physical force, the aristocracy could appropriate what those forces produced and redistribute it as it saw fit.

Feudal societies exist on the premise that the labor of non-kin must support the lives of the rulers. These societies share several features (Gates, 1996):

1. Kinship Units: The dominant units of production are communities organized around kinship.
2. State Dependence: The state depends on the local communities, and the tribute people give it is used by the ruling class rather than being exchanged or reinvested.
3. Adversarial Relationship: Producers and rulers often have an adversarial relationship.
4. Political Control: Production is controlled politically, rather than through direct control of the means of production.

How tightly organized these tributary systems were varied by society. Some rulers even took part directly. They ran large-scale projects: flood control, canals, irrigation, and roads.

Imperial China is a leading example. Its ruling class was chosen through exams. Any male subject could in principle sit them, regardless of his parents’ status.

Karl Wittfogel’s (1957) theory of “hydraulic despotism” explains why. Large-scale irrigation, he argued, needs a centralized state to build and run it. This need for coordination, Wittfogel claimed, is why states like imperial China grew so centralized. China is the clearest case.

Other tightly-organized systems include dynastic Egypt, the pre-Columbian Inca Empire, and Imperial Rome. Feudal Europe, medieval Japan, and pre-colonial Bali, by contrast, were more loosely organized (Gates, 1996).

Capitalist Mode of Production

How Capitalist Production Works

Capitalism is the most recent mode of production. It is also the most familiar. It first emerged during the North American and Western European industrial revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Gates, 1996).

In capitalism, an entrepreneur buys or rents materials they need but do not already own.

Marxists call these the factors of production.

They can include money, raw materials, machines, land, buildings, energy, and patents.

The entrepreneur then hires workers through a labor market to do the work. Once the goods are sold, the entrepreneur pays the workers. They then decide whether to consume or reinvest the remaining profit.

The major power dynamic in capitalism is between employers and employees. This became especially apparent in early eighteenth-century England, where industrial, factory production first made capitalism possible on a large scale.

Marx and Engels described this dynamic directly in class terms.

It is the struggle between the bourgeoisie, who own the means of production, and the proletariat, who must sell their labor to survive (Marx & Engels, 1967).

What distinguishes capitalism from the other modes is the private property the capitalist class owns. Ownership is the dividing line. Workers in the kinship and tributary modes generally own their own tools or land.

In capitalism, workers usually do not own the factories or businesses they work in. So, to survive, they must sell their labor to the capitalists (Gates, 1996).

Labor as a Commodity

Ownership is what divides the two. By keeping wages low, capitalists can sell what workers produce for more than it cost to make.

This separates workers from the means of production in a way they are not under the domestic or tributary modes.

The two are not the same. In the domestic and tributary modes, workers retain enough control over their labor to decide, to some degree, when to work.

This is not true in capitalism: employees generally cannot decide whether to show up each day.

Labor is not truly a factor of production, Marxists argue. Society treats it as though a market for labor exists, just as for any other factor of production, but labor is a human activity inseparable from the person performing it.

In capitalism, the entrepreneur is legally entitled, under the country’s legal system, to the value of labor they do not pay back to the worker. This is because the entrepreneur has initiated, and others have accepted, the contracts leading to production.

Petty Capitalist Production

Commodities are goods and services produced deliberately for markets rather than for the consumption of a producer. Petty capitalists are people who produce commodities through businesses that are organized on principles of kinship.

The growth of these businesses is limited by the requirements and demands of the government. These petty capitalists can cooperate with governmental institutions to resent and resist governmental constraints on market activity. Ultimately, this activity is intended to benefit the state.

Petty capitalism is differentiated from capitalism not in relation to the state, but in their relations to labor. In capitalism, laborers are hired in markets.

Meanwhile, in petty capitalism, several kinds of labor exploitation, such as child labor, slavery, indentured servitude, apprenticeship, caste, and so forth, are available.

The relations of production to these two modes have led some analysts to argue that they are transitional phases leading to capitalism.

Some scholars argue the petty capitalist mode is subordinate to the tributary mode. The claim is economic. In the tributary mode, the state itself insists on maintaining kinship relations as the foundation of production, with the surplus transferred upward to the state (Gates, 1996).

Later scholarship builds on this idea. It calls this pattern the articulation of modes of production. This is the process by which two or more distinct modes coexist and are structurally linked within a society, each shaping how the other operates (Wolpe, 1980).

Socialism

Socialism can be considered to be the fifth mode of production, though it remains largely theoretical.

Although there have been several attempts to establish socialism on small and large scales, classless societies engaged in production were not common outcomes of these experiments.

Socialism often faced violent opposition from two sides. Owners of capital would no longer be able to profit from or direct investment. Tribute-extracting state managers, meanwhile, would need to answer to the citizens of the societies they governed (Gates, 1996).

Modes vs. Means of production

A mode of production refers to the specific organization of economic production in a given society.

The term is newer. It includes the means of production a society uses, such as factories, machines, and raw materials.

The means of production fall into two broad categories. These are instruments of labor and subjects of labor.

Instruments of labor include the tools, factories, and infrastructure needed to produce goods, while subjects of labor are the natural resources and raw materials used. In an industrialized society, this can also include factories and mines.

The two ideas are easy to conflate. Mode of production, though, refers to how people produce the means to survive. Wolf and Marx alike believed that human society could be characterized by periods of different dominant modes of production (Wolf, 1982).

Critical Evaluation

The mode-of-production framework has real, durable value.

It gives historians, anthropologists, and sociologists a single vocabulary for comparing economic systems as different as a foraging band and a modern capitalist economy.

It has also attracted sustained, well-founded criticism.

Because “mode of production” is a broad category rather than a single testable hypothesis, its strongest test is a sustained historical case study, not a controlled experiment. Hill Gates’s (1996) study of Chinese economic history is the load-bearing evidence behind the tributary and petty-capitalist modes described above.

Aim: To test one question. Is a thousand years of Chinese economic history better explained by one imported category, such as a uniform “Asiatic mode of production”? Or by the coexistence of two distinct modes: an extractive tributary state, and a persistent petty-capitalist mode of small, kinship-organized production?

Method: Gates combined economic-historical analysis of Chinese archival sources across successive dynasties. She paired this with her own fieldwork. Her subjects were small family businesses in twentieth-century Taiwan.

Results: Across a thousand years, Gates found a recurring pattern. The state extracted tribute. This coexisted with a separate sphere of small-scale, family-run commodity production, one that was neither “feudal” nor fully capitalist.

Conclusion: This petty-capitalist mode is not a transitional stage toward full capitalism. It is a distinct, durable mode in its own right.

Evaluation: The study’s strength is its time depth, combined with direct fieldwork. This let Gates test the category against both the deep past and living social relations. Its main limitation: China’s tributary state was unusually centralized. How far the pattern generalizes beyond China remains untested.

The framework’s taxonomy has also drawn direct criticism. Five disagreements stand out:

1. How Many Modes Exist? Scholars have proposed anywhere from three to six distinct modes, with no agreed procedure for classifying a hybrid economy.
2. The Contested Asiatic Mode. The historical label for centralized tributary states has been criticized for flattening very different societies into one Eurocentric category.
3. Articulation Is Under-Specified. The idea that different modes coexist and shape each other is attractive, but critics say it describes coexistence more than it explains how one mode constrains another.
4. Gender Is Neglected in the Kinship Mode. Even the domestic mode, often called egalitarian, embeds gender-based inequalities in who controls labor within the kin group. The fuller feminist critique is developed in Marxist feminism.
5. Is the Framework Unfalsifiable? Because an awkward case can always be rescued with a new sub-category, the framework shares something of the unfalsifiability charge levelled at Marxism generally.

How Many Modes Are There?

Aidan Foster-Carter surveyed the 1970s “modes of production” debate. He found the concept had multiplied into too many competing categories: feudal, Asiatic, tributary, colonial, petty-commodity, and more (Foster-Carter, 1978).

This proliferation risked turning the framework into a label. It got applied after the fact to whatever a society turned out to look like. A rigorous tool should predict or explain, not just classify in hindsight.

This does not make the framework worthless. But it is a real caution against treating any single taxonomy as settled, rather than one influential proposal among several.

This article’s own taxonomy illustrates the problem: three of Wolf’s original modes, plus two later additions, petty-capitalist and socialist. How a researcher classifies an economy shapes what the framework can predict about it.

The Contested Asiatic Mode

The Asiatic mode raises a related problem.

Wittfogel’s hydraulic-despotism thesis, and the broader “Asiatic mode” label it fed, have both been criticized. They flatten very different societies — imperial China, Mughal India, dynastic Egypt, the Inca Empire — into one category. That category is defined mainly by how they differ from Europe.

This criticism echoes a wider postcolonial complaint. Western scholarship, it argues, classifies non-Western societies against an implicit European norm.

Wolf’s own choice of “tributary” rather than “Asiatic” was partly a response to this concern. But the deeper difficulty remains only partly resolved: how to compare tributary states without a Eurocentric baseline.

The criticism targets the label, not the pattern itself. Some tributary states really were more centralized than others.

Is the Framework Unfalsifiable?

An “unfalsifiable” claim is one that can never be tested against evidence. Any awkward result gets explained away instead of counted as a genuine failure. This flexibility is a strength for description, but a weakness for prediction.

The mode-of-production framework can always rescue an awkward case. It just proposes a new sub-category, or a new articulation between modes. So it shares something of the unfalsifiability charge levelled at classical Marxism generally.

Defenders disagree. As they do for Marxism as a whole, they argue the framework’s specific claims stay open to empirical disconfirmation, even if the broader vocabulary stays flexible.

Gates’s (1996) finding that petty-capitalist production is a durable mode, not a transitional stage, is exactly this kind of testable claim. It could, in principle, have come out the other way.

Contemporary Research

The most active recent question for this framework is not the classic historical succession above. It is a live one instead: does a single, planetary capitalist mode now absorb every other way of organizing work? Or do kinship-organized and state-directed forms of production persist alongside it?

Does Kinship Production Survive Inside Capitalism?

Silvia Narotzky’s (2016) review for the Annual Review of Anthropology is the high-validity anchor for this question.

Aim: To establish whether small-scale, family-organized agricultural production still counts as a genuinely distinct way of organizing production today. Narotzky revisits the classic debate over how to define a “peasantry.”

Method: A synthetic review of two arrangements. One is contract farming.

Here, nominally independent family farmers grow crops to a buyer’s specification. The other is agroecological “short-circuit” food provisioning, where producers sell directly to consumers.

Findings: Neither arrangement fits neatly. Both resist the simple labels “peasant” or “capitalist farmer.” Contract farmers keep nominal ownership of their land and labor decisions, yet stay financially dependent on a buyer’s capitalist value chain.

Agroecological producers organize around kinship partly as an alternative to capitalist integration. Even so, they still depend on capitalist markets and credit to survive.

Conclusion: Narotzky calls both patterns “dependent autonomy.” This is genuine organizational difference from capitalist production, combined with real economic dependence on capitalist circuits.

Evaluation: As a synthetic review in a leading, selective journal, this sits well up the evidence hierarchy for a comparative question of this kind. It is considerably stronger than any single ethnographic case study. Even so, its conclusions are only as strong as the primary studies it draws together.

What Happens When Tributary States Are Dismantled?

A lower-weight but directly relevant strand of research asks a different question. What happens when a tributary or state-socialist mode is deliberately dismantled?

Grosman, Okhmatovskiy, and Wright (2016) reviewed over a hundred studies published since 1989. Their subject: countries moving from centrally planned to market-based economies. State ownership was not simply replaced with dispersed private capitalist ownership.

Instead, diverse and often durable hybrid forms of state-affiliated corporate control emerged. These persisted well beyond the initial transition period. The balance between state and private control varied substantially by country and sector.

This is a review of a large, heterogeneous literature, not a single primary dataset. So it carries somewhat less independent evidentiary weight than a large-scale primary study would.

Even so, it extends Narotzky’s finding into a different domain. Transitions between modes of production, whether historical or contemporary, tend to produce durable hybrid arrangements. One mode rarely replaces another cleanly.

Despite these qualifications, the framework’s core move has remained productive: separating what a society can physically produce from who controls that production and who benefits from it. This is why economic anthropologists and comparative political economists continue to use, and revise, it today.

References

Engels, F. (1974). The German ideology, Part One: With selections from Parts Two and Three, together with Marx’s “Introduction to a critique of political economy”. Lawrence & Wishart.

Foster-Carter, A. (1978). The modes of production controversy. New Left Review, I(107), 47–77.

Gates, H. (1996). China’s motor: A thousand years of petty capitalism. Cornell University Press.

Grosman, A., Okhmatovskiy, I., & Wright, M. (2016). State control and corporate governance in transition economies: 25 years on from 1989. Corporate Governance: An International Review, 24(3), 200–221. https://doi.org/10.1111/corg.12145

Jessop, R. (1990). Mode of production. In Marxian economics (pp. 289–296). Palgrave Macmillan.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1967). The Communist Manifesto (S. Moore, Trans.).

Marx, K., Cohen, J., & Hobsbawm, E. J. (1966). Pre-capitalist economic formations. Science and Society, 30(3).

Narotzky, S. (2016). Where have all the peasants gone? Annual Review of Anthropology, 45, 301–318. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-anthro-102215-100240

Sahlins, M. (1972). Stone age economics. Aldine-Atherton.

Wittfogel, K. A. (1957). Oriental despotism: A comparative study of total power. Yale University Press.

Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the people without history. University of California Press.

Wolpe, H. (1980). The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.