Social Systems and the Means of Production

[VeritablyV]

Forgive me if my understanding of this is flawed by any means, the point of the post is so I can better understand it.

How does the Means of Production differ in each social structure, Tribal -> Slave-Society -> Feudalism -> Capitalism -> Socialism/Communism?
*Note; I got my understanding of the social transitions from the Wikipedia Article about Marx's Theory of History, which I have a feeling is very simplified and incorrect.

How does these changes in Means of Production produce the next society?

I don't understand the Slave-Society mostly. Feudalism I understand as the serfs exchanging rent in the form of produce, or labor for part of the produce of the land or subsistence, living quarters, and "protection". Now in the Capitalism phase, the workers do not live on the land or own any means of production themselves(other than labor power?) and are thus alienated from it all as well as what they are producing, as they get paid in wages.

[Kamil]

The means of production are the tools and materials used to produce goods, changes in the means of productions means technologic developments in how goods are made and services given. New technology and production techniques change the nature of economic relationships and economic relationships subsequently serve as the basis of culture and civilization. This is best illustrated by the industrial revolution giving birth to the modern labor movement, the wellspring of progressive thought and revolution.

[VeritablyV]

Would the working class be categorized as means of production, or at least their labor-power?

I'm looking more so for a description of the means of production in the different society structures and how they transitioned between, primarily the transition between Feudalism and Capitalism. I think I may have worded the question oddly and perhaps be asking for something that would be excessive to fully explain.

[ckaihatsu]

The means of production are the tools and materials used to produce goods, changes in the means of productions means technologic developments in how goods are made and services given. New technology and production techniques change the nature of economic relationships and economic relationships subsequently serve as the basis of culture and civilization.




This is best illustrated by the industrial revolution giving birth to the modern labor movement, the wellspring of progressive thought and revolution.


*Roughly*, yes, but we should make sure not to fall into the facile explanation of technological determinism. History is shaped by the development of material *social* historical forces, such as the rise of market (merchant) relations that paved the way for the increased use of machinery, and wage-slavery, in the industrial revolution:





Harman, _A People's History of the World_, Chapter 4, pp. 247-248




Slavery and wage slavery

The ideas of the Enlightenment did not simply emerge, accidentally, from the heads of certain thinkers. They were at least a partial reflection of changes taking place in the relations between human beings — change which had gone furthest in Britain and Holland.

The central change through the turmoil of the 16th and 17th centuries was that exchange through the market played an increasingly dominant role in the way people obtained a livelihood. The church might burn heretics and the Habsburg armies sack urban centres opposed to their rule. But popes, emperors, princes and lords all required cash to finance their efforts—and this meant that, even while trying to preserve the old order, they helped spread the market forces which would ultimately undermine it.

This was shown most clearly after the conquest of the Americas. Silver from the American mines was key to financing the armies which backed the counter-Reformation. But the flow of that silver was part of a new intercontinental network of market relations. Much of it flowed through intermediaries in north west Europe and out to China, the east Indies and India to buy luxury goods. New international shipping routes—from Manila to Acapulco, from Vera Cruz to Seville, from Amsterdam to Batavia32 and from Batavia to Canton — were beginning to bind people’s lives in one part of the world to those in another.

Market relations rest on the assumption that, however unequal people’s social standing, they have an equal right to accept or reject a particular transaction. The buyer is free to offer any price and the seller free to reject the offer. Mandarin and merchant, baron and burgher, landlord and tenant have equal rights in this respect. In so far as the market spreads, old prejudices based on dominance and deference come under siege from calculations in terms of cash.

The Enlightenment was a recognition in the realm of ideas of this change taking place in reality. Its picture of a world of equal men (although a few Enlightenment thinkers raised the question of equal rights for women) was an abstraction from a world in which people were meant to be equally able to agree, or fail to agree, to buy and sell goods in their possession. The ‘rational’ state was one in which this could take place without arbitrary obstruction.

Yet there were two great holes in the Enlightenment picture as applied in the 18th century—and not just to ‘backward’ regions of Europe such as Castile, Sicily or eastern Europe, but to Britain, the model for people like Voltaire. One was the chattel slavery of the Americas, and the other the wage slavery of the propertyless labourer at home.