For Marx, the type of
economic system (mode of production) in place at any given point in history
plays a powerful role in shaping all other aspects of life in that society,
including general patterns of interaction between and among individuals and
groups (relations of production), as well as the nature and purposes of
major social institutions, such as the state, religion, family, and so on.
Because he focused his intellectual energies on understanding the logic and
nature of large-scale industrial capitalism, that form of economic system
occupied virtually all of his writings on the economy.
As we’ve
discussed, Marx believed that capitalism created two general classes of
people: those who owned the means of production (the bourgeoisie, aka
capitalists), and those who had to sell their labor in order to earn a
wage to survive (the proletariat, aka the working class). Thus, because of
the nature of this system, and because of its logic (the pursuit of profit
as the purpose of economic action), workers and owners were inescapably
locked in conflict with one
another. (The relations of production.) So too workers were pitted against
one another, as well. As for the superstructure, Marx believed that all
social institutions operated in ways that continually
reproduced the industrial
capitalist system.
