The preceding papers have already formulated the idea that Marx's work contains a general scientific theory of history. In particular, they have shown that, in the formulation of this theory, Marx's construction of the central concept of the 'mode of production' has the function of an epistemological break with respect to the whole tradition of the philosophy of history. For in its generality it is absolutely incompatible with the principles of idealism, whether dogmatic or empiricist, and it progressively revolutionizes the whole problematic of society and history.

    If this is the case, we know that it is because Marx's 'historical materialism' gives us not only elements of scientific historical knowledge (e.g., elements restricted to the history of 'bourgeois' society, in its economic and political aspects), but, in principle, a true theoretical science, and therefore an abstract science. The concept of the 'mode of production' and the concepts immediately related to it thus appear as the first abstract concepts whose validity is not as such limited to a given period or type of society, but on which, on the contrary, the concrete knowledge of this period and type depends. Hence the importance of defining them at the level of generality that they demand, i.e., in fact, the importance of posing a number of problems which the science of history has been waiting for since Marx.

    Althusser however, in his paper, has shown us that the explicit formulation (and therefore recognition) of an abstract theory of history is surrounded by difficulties and ambiguities. He has shown the historical and philosophical reasons for this. Marx's theory was able to realize the paradox of having as its constant object the very history whose scientific knowledge it inaugurated, and yet of offering nowhere the adequate concept of this history, reflected for itself. I should like first to add a few specifications of this point, which will serve as a direct introduction to my particular problem.

    It is not quite accurate to say that this theoretical formulation is missing: several texts give a remarkable outline of it, e.g., the first section of The German Ideology (which already contained a whole new definition of 'production'), the various preparatory drafts for Capital collected into the Grundrisse der Kritik der politishen Ökonomie,[1] and above all the Preface to

 
page 202

A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the terms of which have been constantly discussed in the Marxist tradition. These are very general, prospective or summary texts; texts in which the sharpness of the distinctions and the peremptoriness of the claims are only equalled by the brevity of the justifications, the elliptical nature of the definitions. By an unfortunate accident, which is really a true historical necessity, the only expositions of the principles of the theory of history and the main expositions of its method (the 1857 Introduction ) are of this type, and most of them were also intentionally left as incomplete and unpublished manuscripts. So despite the malicious critical intentions that inspire those readers of Marx who have asked 'Where precisely did Marx set out his conception of history?', they have not been completely unfair.

 
page 203

    Here we find a procedure characteristic of Marx when he wants to think his own 'novelty', i.e., his rupture, his scientificity: the delimitation of a classicism. Just as there is an economic classicism (in England), there is a historical classicism, represented by the French and German historians of the early nineteenth century (Thierry, Guizot and Niebuhr). This, therefore, is Marx's point of departure: their point of arrival. Historical knowledge in its most advanced form shows the succession of 'civilizations', 'political regimes', 'events', 'cultures', organized and rationalized by a series of class struggles, a general form whose patterns can be listed: slaves and free citizens, patricians and plebeans, serfs and feudal lords, masters and journeymen, land-owners and bourgeois, bourgeois and proletarians, etc. This heritage, this fact, proposed by history, but itself already the result of a labour of knowledge, is reflected in the famous opening of the Manifesto : 'The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.' This sentence is not the first statement of Marx's theory, it predates it, it summarizes the raw material of its work of transformation.

    This is a very important point, for it enables us to formulate Marx's question more precisely, the question contained in the Preface to A Contribution: on what conditions can the claim that history is the history of class struggles be a scientifc utterance ? In other words what classes are these? what are classes? what is their struggle?

    If we turn to the text of the Preface itself, we do indeed find an exposition of a relationship between the 'social formation' (Gesellschaftsformation ) and its 'economic base' or 'economic structure' (Struktur ), the anatomy of which is constituted by the study of the mode of production. The social formation is the site of a first 'contradiction' between the classes which Marx describes in terms of struggle, war, and opposition, a 'contradiction' which can be 'now hidden, now open', and whose terms are 'in a word, oppressor and oppressed' (The Communist Manifesto ). Here it is related just as to its essence to a second form of 'contradiction' which Marx is always very careful not to confuse with the first, even terminologically: he calls it an 'antagonism', 'not in the sense of individual antagonism' (nicht im individuellen Sinn ), i.e., not a struggle between men but an antagonistic structure; it is inside the economic base, typical of a determinate mode of production, and its terms are called 'the level of the productive forces' and 'the relations of production'. The antagonism between the productive forces and the relations of production has the effect of a revolutionary rupture, and it is this effect which determines the transition from one mode of production to another ('progressive epochs in the economic formation of society'), and thereby the transformation of the whole social formation. Marx himself chose to restrict his study to the level of the relatively autonomous sphere or stage of this 'antagonism' inside the economic structure.

    But it remains strictly impossible for us to locate this sphere, since the terms that define it do not yet have any meaning. Indeed, it would be

 
page 204

absolutely wrong to take the descriptive style of some of these terms or the direct simplicity with which Marx presents them as a pretext for believing them to be given in immediate experience and of obvious significance. On the contrary, they have been produced by Marx (who is careful to remind us -- notably in his use of the term 'civil society' -- that a considerable part of the raw material of this production had been constituted by economic and philosophical tradition), and they are so little obvious that it is extremely difficult to make use of them in actual sociological analyses without first mastering the definitions that Marx gave of them elsewhere. That is why they are often described from the standpoint of bourgeois empiricist sociology as paradoxical, heteroclite or inconsistent, or else assimilated without further ado to other terms: technology, economics, institutions, human relations, etc.

    Taking this textual reading further, we can draw from it the two principles on which is based the transformation of history into a science: the principle of periodization and the principle of the articulation of the different practices in the social structure. One diachronic principle, it seems, and one synchronic principle. The principle of the articulation of the practices refers to the construction (Bau ) or mechanism of 'correspondence' in which the social formation is presented as constituted out of different levels (we shall also speak of them as instances and practices). Marx lists three : the economic base, the legal and political superstructures, and the forms of social consciousness. As for periodization, it distributes history according to the epochs of its economic structure. These two principles introduce a double reduction of temporal continuity. Leaving aside the problem of primitive societies (i.e., the way Marx conceived the origin of society: there is no allusion to this here, any more than there is in the Manifesto ), there is, first, a reduction to an absolute invariance in the elements which are found in every social structure (an economic base, legal and political forms, and ideological forms); second, there is a division into periods which replaces historical continuity with a discontinuity, a succession of temporarily invariant states of the structure which change by rapid mutation ('revolution'): the antagonism that induces the mutation can only be defined by this invariance itself, i.e., by the permanence of the terms which it opposes.
    These states of the structure are the modes of production, and the history of society can be reduced to a discontinuous succession of modes of production.
    Now it is essential to pose the question of the theoretical status of these concepts. Are they all positive concepts? Does the text as a whole have a homogeneous content of theoretical knowledge, at the level of scientific abstraction which I have just discussed, as Gramsci thinks, for example, regarding it as he does as the most exact exposition of the 'philosophy of praxis'?

    I think, on the contrary, that within theoretical practice itself, this text has the status of what is called a set of practical concepts.[3] In other words, this text offers

    And we should also note that the insufficient elaboration, in this first draft, of the concepts which designate the articulation of the instances of the social formation, is in itself the (negative) cause of a constant confusion in Marxist literature between the social formation and its economic infra-structure (which is itself often related to one mode of production). Many of the contemporary discussions of non-capitalist or pre-capitalist modes of production bear witness to this.

 
page 208

of this conflict . . .') must be compared with many others in The German Ideology, in The Poverty of Philosophy, in the correspondence (notably in Engels's letter to Bloch: 'We (=men) make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions . . .'). All these formulations are the matrices of the idea that it is men who make history on the basis of previous conditions. But who are these 'men'? A first, 'naïve' reading of our Preface suggests that they are firstly the agents of the process of the historical transformation of the social structure via the mediation of the activity of economic production. We are to understand that men produce their material means of survival, and at the same time, the social relations in which they produce, which are either maintained or transformed. In consequence, they are secondly the real (concrete) supports of the different practices articulated into the social structure: this articulation is precisely given only by the men who at one and the same time take part in the production process, are legal subjects and are consciousnesses. The importance of this concept can thus be measured by the function of structural cohesion it fulfils in theory. But its ambiguity is revealed in the fact that it belongs simultaneously to several incompatible systems of concepts: theoretical and non-theoretical, scientific and ideological. The concept of 'men' thus constitutes a real point where the utterance slips away towards the regions of philosophical or commonplace ideology. The task of epistemology here is to stop the utterance slipping away by fixing the meaning of the concept.

    If this really is the ambiguous status of these concepts, if they really are practical concepts, signal concepts within a still unbalanced problematic (periodization, correspondence -- articulation of the practices, men), then this task becomes necessary. I propose to begin this work here, an explicit labour which transforms these 'practical' concepts into theoretical concepts of the Marxist theory of history, a labour which strips them of their present theoretical form in order to make them theoretically adequate to their practical content. At the same time, those concepts, which are no more than expressions of the exigencies of the old ideological problematic, will disappear completely. And at the same time, too, weak and open points will appear which will demand the production of new theoretical concepts even in the region explored by Marx, and make this production possible. For, at the most abstract level, the fruitful incompleteness of Marx's work is the necessary effect of its scientific character.

    Since the theoretical concepts of the Preface to A Contribution have this compound status as the anticipations and summaries (or 'results') of an analysis, the text of Capital cannot therefore constitute a mere 'verification' or application of them. The text of Capital, in its necessary order of exposition, is the process of the production, construction and definition of these theoretical concepts, or at least of some of them. If we take the 'mode of production' as the main object of our analysis, it is because in that very exposition Marx himself designates the theoretical object of Capital as the concept of the capitalist mode of production.

 
page 210

exists on the same plane as the many other modes we find in the course of an analysis of Capital. For example:

Modes of exchange : 'It is not the economy, i.e., the process of production itself that is emphasized as the distinguishing mark of the two categories, money-economy and credit-economy, but rather the mode of exchange . . . between the various agents of production or producers' (Verkehrsweise ) (Capital, Vol. II, p. 116). Modes of circulation : 'What determines that a portion of the capital-value invested in means of production is endowed with the character of fixed capital is exclusively the peculiar manner in which this value circulates. This specific manner of circulation (diese eigene Weise der Zirkulation ) arises from the specific manner in which the instrument of labour transmits is value to the product, or in which it behaves (sich . . .verhält ) as a creator of value during the process of production. This manner again arises from the special way in which the instruments of labour function in the labour-process (aus der besonderen Art der Funktion der Arbeitsmittel )' (Capital, Vol. II, p. 160). Modes of consumption : 'Even the number of so-called natural needs, as also the modes of satisfying them (die Art ihrer Befriedigung ), are themselves a historical product' (Capital, T.I, p. 174; Vol. I, p. 171).

    This descriptive and comparative character indicates that the expression 'mode of production' does not initially contain any reference to the breadth of its application other than in the form of a tendency towards generality: we find the capitalist mode of production, in the narrow sense of the industrial mode of production, the utilization of machinery, steadily extended to the various branches of industry:

    But when surplus-value has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus-labour, it no longer suffices for capita!, while leaving intact the traditional labour process, simply to prolong the duration of that process. The technical and social conditions of the process, and consequently the very mode of production must be transformed. Only then can the productivity of labour be increased, thus decreasing the value of labour-power, and thereby shortening the time necessary for the reproduction of that value (Capital, T.II, p. 9; Vol. I, p. 315).

a revolution in the conditions of production, i.e., an alteration in his tools or his mode of working, or in both.

 
page 211

relative quantities necessary for the satisfaction of the producer's needs and for surplus-value, only intervenes here insofar as it depends in each historical epoch, on a certain form of the labour process, i.e., on the relationship between certain instruments (means of labour) and certain forms of labour organization (which include non-organizations, such as when the individual producer alone sets to work the tools which enable him to obtain an actual useful product). Then they exclude any consideration of the material nature of the objects which produce or undergo a transformation, insofar as such a consideration refers to the special features of branches of the social division of production which produce special use-values with peculiar technological characteristics. In this sense, Marx had already written in the 1857 Introduction that 'political economy is not technology' in the sense that the latter term had acquired at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and whose historical origins he reveals in the chapter in Volume One on Modern Industry. These two negative determinations are to be found in the text of the chapter on the labour process :

    Relics of by-gone means of labour possess the same importance for the investigation of extinct economic forms of society, as does the structure of fossil bones for a knowledge of the organization of extinct species of animals. It is less what is produced than how it is produced (Nicht was . . . sondern wie ), and by what means of labour, that enables us to distinguish different economic epochs. Means of labour supply a standard of the degree of development of the labourer and they are indicators of the social relations in which he labours (Nicht nur Gradmesser der Entrwicklung der menschlichen Arbeitskraft, sondern auch Anzeiger der gesellschaftlichen Verhältnissen, worin gearbeitet wird ) (Capital, T.I, p. 182; Vol. I, pp. 179-80).

    We can define this analysis as a differential determination of forms, and define a 'mode' as a system of forms which represents one state of the variation of the set of elements which necessarily enter into the process considered. This definition, which I am about to put to the test, is true for all modes, and on each occasion it requires two things: a listing of the places (or functions) which feature in the process concerned, and a determination of the pertinent criteria which enable us to distinguish between the forms occupying these places. Thus, if we return to the above-mentioned example of the mode of circulation (Capital, Vol. II, p. 160), we find that this criterion consists of the fact that it transmits its value to the product either in toto or only in parts spread over several periods of production. At the same time, we can derive from it the concepts by which Marx designates existence as an

 
page 212

element of the process: function, factor. But in order to list these places we must refer to another 'mode', the 'mode of production' itself; we are not dealing with a relatively autonomous process with its own consistency. It is different with the mode of production itself, and there we find that consistency.

(2) T H E  E L E M E N T S  O F  T H E  S Y S T E M  O F  F O R M S

In the case, therefore, of the mode of production (in the strict sense), we still have to identify these elements. Here we shall find it necessary to compare several of Marx's texts which complement one another, and even to suggest interpretations of them whose well-foundedness will, I hope, emerge later in the paper.

    We find a first extremely clear text in Capital Volume Two:

    Whatever the social form of production, labourers and means of production always remain factors (Faktoren ) of it. But in a state of separation from each other either of these factors can be such only potentially (der Möglichkeit nach ). For production to go on at all they must combine (Verbindung ). The specific manner in which this combination is accomplished distinguishes the different epochs of the structure of society one from another (Capital, Vol. II, p. 34 -- modified).

    Two of the elements we are seeking are indicated here:

(1) The labourer (labour power);
(2) The means of production.

    The text goes on:

    In the present case, the separation of the free worker from his means of production is the starting-point given, and we have seen how and under what conditions these two elements are united in the hands of the capitalist, namely, as the productive mode of existence of his capital.

    (3) The non-worker, appropriating surplus-labour. Elsewhere, Marx describes him as the representative of the 'class of large proprietors' (Grossbesitzerklasse -- Capital, T.II, p. 185; Vol. I, p. 511). This is the capitalist. Besides this, we find here an element of a different kind which we could call a connexion (relation ) between the preceding elements: it can take two exclusive values: separation (Trennung )/property.

    If we compare the results of our analysis of this text with a series of other texts, particularly those contained in Marx's unpublished draft Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations (op. cit.), and in the Chapter in Volume Three of Capital on the 'Genesis of Capitalist Ground Rent', we find the same elements and long descriptions of their combinations. The labourer is specified as the

 
page 213

direct producer ; the property relation is itself specified according to several complex forms, notable the duality of 'possession' (use, enjoyment) and 'property' (property strictly speaking).

    But the essential interest of these texts is that they oblige us to introduce into the structure a second connexion distinct from the first, a second relation between the 'factors' of the combination. This is a very important point, for it governs our whole understanding of the structure. We must therefore try to define the nature of this connexion very dearly, starting from Marx's texts themselves. This connexion corresponds to what Marx designates by various terms such as the real material appropriation of the means of production by the producer in the labour process (Aneignung, Appropriation, wirkliche Aneignung ), or simply as the appropriation of nature by man. Two points must be clearly established:

    (1) this connexion is distinct from the preceding one;

    (2) this, too, really is a connexion, a relation between the previously listed elements.

    The relative looseness of Marx's vocabulary on this point in the texts I have mentioned (particularly Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations ) makes it difficult to prove the first point. Marx uses a whole series of practically equivalent terms (Aneignung, Appropriation ; Besitz, Benutzung, etc.) to describe all the connexions between the producer and his means of production. This looseness depends in reality on the difficulty Marx felt in clearly thinking the distinction between the two connexions, a difficulty I shall explain. Nevertheless, let us take the text of Volume One of Capital on absolute surplus-value and relative surplus-value (T.II, pp. 183ff.; Vol. I, pp. 508ff.): there we find two uses of the word Aneignung (appropriation) less than two pages apart but with obviously different meanings corresponding to the two connexions I have been discussing:

    in der individuellen Aneignung von Naturgegenständen zu seinem Lebenszwecken kontrolliert er sich selbst. Später wird er kontrolliert (In the individual appropriation of natural objects the labourer controls himself. Afterwards his labour is controlled by others);
    'die Aneignung dieser Mehrarbeit durch das Kapital ' (the appropriation of that surplus-labour by capital).

    But the first does not designate a property relation: it belongs to the analysis of what Marx called the 'labour process', or rather it situates the analysis of that labour process as part of the analysis of the mode of production. Nowhere in it does the capitalist intervene as an owner, but only the labourer, the means of labour and the object of labour.

 
page 214

    In the light of this distinction, we can now re-read for example the chapter on the labour process (T.I, pp. 186-7; Vol. I, pp. 184-5). Marx writes:

    The labour process, turned into the process by which the capitalist consumes labour-power, exhibits two characteristic phenomena. First, the labourer works under the control of the capitalist . . . Secondly, the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the labourer, its immediate producer . . . (T.I, p. 187; Vol. I, p. 185).

    From the point of view of property, the labour process is an operation between things which the capitalist has purchased. 'The product of this process belongs, therefore, to him, just as much as does the wine which is the product of a process of fermentation completed in his cellar.'

    In the capitalist mode of production, the labour process is such that individual labour does not set to work the society's means of production, which are the only means of production able to function as such. Without the capitalist's 'control', which is a technically indispensable moment of the labour process, labour does not possess the fitness (Zwetkmässigkeit ) it requires if it is to be social labour, i.e., labour used by society and recognized by it. The fitness peculiar to the capitalist mode of production implies the cooperation and division of the functions of control and execution. It is a form of the second connexion I have discussed, which can now be defined as the direct producer's ability to set to work the means of social production. In the pages of Capital, Marx defines several forms of this connexion: the autonomy (Selbständigkeit ) of the direct producer, and the forms of mutual dependence of the producers (co-operation, etc.).

    We can already see that recognition of this second connexion in its conceptual independence, in its difference from the 'property' connexion (A), is the key to several very important theses of Capital. Notably the double function of the capitalist as the exploiter of labour-power ('property') and as the organizer of production ('real appropriation'); a double function expounded by Marx in the chapters on co-operation, manufacture and modern industry (Volume One). This double function is an index of what I shall call the double nature of the division of labour in production (the 'technical' division of labour and the 'social' division of labour); at the same time, it is an index of the interdependence or intersection of these two divisions, which itself reflects the fact that the two connexions which I have distinguished both belong to a single 'Verbindung ', to a single combination, i.e., to the structure of a single mode of production.

    That is why the distinction between these two connexions finally enables us to understand what constitutes the complexity of the combination, the

 
page 215

 
page 216

does not so characterize those earlier modes of production. Marx only finds it again in the hypothetical 'natural community' which inaugurates history: then the form of each of the two connexions was, on the contrary, the union, the belonging together of the labourer and the means of production: on the one hand the almost biological collective property of the land, on the other the biological naturalness of the labour (the earth as 'man's laboratory', indistinctly object and means of labour).

    But the entire difficulty, and any looseness in Marx's terminology, disappear once our analysis deals with the effects of this double articulation of the mode of production, i.e., with the double nature of the 'immediate production process' as a labour process and (in its capitalist form) as a process of self-expansion (Verwertung ) of value (the distinction between these two constitutes the object of Volume One, Chapter VII).

    By varying the combination of these elements according to the two connexions which are part of the structure of every mode of production, we can therefore reconstitute the various modes of production, i.e., we can set out the 'presuppositions' for the theoretical knowledge of them, which are quite simply the concepts of the conditions of their historical existence. In this way, we can even to a certain extent generate modes of production which have never existed in an independent form, and which do not therefore strictly speaking form part of our 'periodization' -- modes of production such as Marx called the 'mode of commodity production' (the reunion of individual small producers owning their own means of production and setting them to work without co-operation); or modes of production for which it is only possible to foresee the general conditions, such as the socialist mode of production. The final result would be a comparative table of the forms of different modes of production which all combine the same 'factors'.

    However, this is by no means a combinatory in the strict sense, i.e., a form of combination in which only the places of the factors and their relations change, but not their nature. Before we go on to prove this in a second section, we can nevertheless draw from what has already been established a number of conclusions as to the nature of the 'determination in the last instance' of the social structure by the form of the production process; which amounts to a justification of what I announced when I referred to the Preface to A Contribution : that the new principle of periodization proposed by Marx contained a complete transformation of the historian's problematic.

(3) D E T E R M I N A T I O N  I N  T H E  L A S T  I N S T A N C E

By a double necessity, the capitalist mode of production is both the mode of production in which the economy is most easily recognized as the 'motor' of history, and the mode of production in which the essence of this 'economy' is unrecognized in principle (in what Marx calls 'fetishism'). That is why the first explanations of the problem of the 'determination in the last instance

 
page 217

 
page 218

    We can therefore first make a specification that can be added to those that the preceding papers have proposed with respect to fetishism: Marx's thesis does not mean that in modes of production other than capitalism the structure of the social relations is transparent to the agents. 'Fetishism' is not absent from them, but displaced (onto Catholicism, politics, etc.). In reality certain of Marx's formulations leave no doubt on this point. For example, at the beginning of the text on Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations, Marx writes about the so-called 'primitive' community:

    The earth is the great laboratory, the arsenal which provides both the means and the materials of labour, and also the seat, the basis of the community. Men relate to it naïvely as the property of the community, and of the community producing and reproducing itself in living labour. Only insofar as the individual is a limb or member of such a community, does he regard himself as an owner or possessor. Real appropriation by means of the process of labour takes place under these pre-conditions, which are not the product of labour but appear as its natural or divine pre-conditions (Grundrisse, p. 376; PCEF, p. 64).

    But this point, which Marx touches on only too briefly (for lack of historical material), is in principle quite clearly linked to the problem of determination in the last instance. Indeed, it emerges that the 'mystification' applies not to the economy (the mode of material production) as such, but precisely to that instance of the social structure which, according to the nature of the mode of production, is determined as occupying the place of determination, the place of the last instance.

    We can now understand why analogous causes produce analogous effects here: in the event, it is possible to give this formulation a precise sense; that is to say, whenever the place of determination is occupied by a single instance, the relationship of the agents will reveal phenomena analogous to 'fetishism'. Perhaps it is not an exaggeration to say that this is the sense of the following passage from Pre-Capitalist Economic Formations on the 'Asiatic' mode of production:

    In most Asiatic fundamental forms . . . the all-embracing unity (Einheit ) which stands above all these small communities may appear as the higher or sole proprietor, the real communities only as heredity possessors. Since the unity is the real owner, and the real pre-condition of common ownership, it is perfectly possible for it to appear as a particular being

 
page 219

above the numerous real, particular communities. The individual is then in fact propertyless, or property . . . appears to be mediated by means of a grant from the total unity -- which is realized in the despot as the father of the many communities -- to the individual through the mediation of the particular community. It therefore follows that the surplus-product (which, incidentally, is legally determined as a consequence of the real appropriation through labour) belongs of itself (von sich selbst) to this higher unity . . . (Grundrisse, pp. 376-7; PCEF, pp. 69-70).

    The communal conditions of real appropriation through labour, such as irrigation systems (very important among the Asian peoples), means of communication, etc., will then appear as the work of the higher unity -- the despotic government which is poised above the lesser communities.

    Because social labour power costs capital nothing, and because, on the other hand, the wage-labourer himself does not develop it before his labour belongs to capital, it appears as a power with which capital is endowed by nature -- a productive force that is immanent in capital. The colossal effects of simple co-operation are to be seen in the gigantic structures of the ancient Asiatics, Egyptians, Etruscans, etc. . . . This power of Asiatic and Egyptian kings, Etruscan theocrats, etc., has in modern society been transferred to the capitalist, whether he be an isolated or a collective capitalist (Capital, T.II, p. 26; Vol. I, pp. 333-4).

 
page 220

    It would therefore be possible and legitimate to look in Asiatic despotism for an analogy to the forms of appearance which mean that in the capitalist mode of production, 'all faculties of labour are projected as faculties of capital, just as all forms of value commodity are projected as forms of money' (Capital ). We should then in fact be basing ourselves on the analogy of the relations between the two connexions with the 'combination' in these two modes of production, i.e., on the analogy of the articulation of the double division of labour (see above).

    But above all, these texts imply that all the levels of the social structure have the structure of a 'mode' in the sense in which I have analysed the mode of production strictly speaking. In other words, they are themselves presented in the form of specific complex combinations (Verbindungen ). They therefore imply specific social relations, which are no more patterns of the inter-subjectivity of the agents than are the social relations of production, but depend on functions of the process concerned: in this sense, I shall be rigorous in speaking of political social relations or ideological social relations. In the analysis of each of these modes of combination, I shall appeal to criteria of pertinence specific to each occasion.

    The problem which I wish to approach is therefore the following: how is the determinant instance in the social structure in a given epoch itself determined, i.e., how does a specific mode of combination of the elements constituting the structure of the mode of production determine the place of determination in the last instance in the social structure, i.e., how does a specific mode of production determine the relations between the various instances of the structure, i.e., ultimately, the articulation of that structure? (What Althusser has called the matrix role of the mode of production.)

    In order to answer this question, at least in principle, I shall consider, not an ideal, but a reduced case: that of a social structure reduced to the articulation of two different instances, an 'economic' instance and a 'political' instance, which will enable me to follow closely certain passages where Marx compares, vis-à-vis ground rent, the feudal mode of production with the capitalist mode of production.

    On the simplest form of feudal ground rent, labour rent (corvée ), Marx writes:

    It is . . . evident that in all forms in which the direct labourer remains the 'possessor' of the means of production and labour conditions necessary for the production of his own means of subsistence, the property relationship must simultaneously appear as a direct relation of lordship and servitude (als unmittelbares Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis ), so that the direct producer is not free; a lack of freedom (Unfreiheit ) which may be reduced from serfdom with enforced labour to a mere tributary relationship. The direct producer, according to our assumption, is to be found here in possession of his own means of production, the necessary material

 
page 221

labour conditions required for the realization of his labour and the production of his own means of subsistence. He conducts his agricultural activity and the rural home industries connected with it independently . . .
    Under such conditions the surplus-labour for the nominal owner of the land can only be extorted from them by other than economic pressure, whatever the form assumed may be . . . Thus, personal conditions of personal dependence are requisite, a lack of personal freedom, no matter to what extent, and being tied to the soil as its accessory (Zubehör ), bondage in the true sense of the word. . . .
    The specific economic form, in which unpaid surplus-labour is pumped out of direct producers, determines the relationship of rulers and ruled, as it grows directly out of production itself and in turn, reacts upon it as a determining element. Upon this, however, is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves, thereby simultaneously its specific political form. It is always the direct relationship of the owners of the conditions of production to the direct producers . . . which reveals the innermost secret, the hidden basis of the entire social structure, and with it the political form of the relation of sovereignty and dependence (Souveränitäts- und Abhängigkeitsverhältnis ), in short, the corresponding specific form of the State . . .
    So much is evident with respect to labour rent, the simplest and most primitive form of rent: Rent is here the primeval form of surplus-labour and coincides with it. But this identity of surplus-value with unpaid labour of others need not be analysed here, because it still exists in its visible, palpable form, since the labour of the direct producer for himself is still separated in space and time from his labour for the landlord, and the latter appears directly in the brutal form of enforced labour for a third person (Capital, Vol. III, pp. 771-2).

    -- a new formulation of the principle of periodization: 'what distinguishes one historical epoch from another'. Here it is the mode of dependence of the social structure with respect to the mode of production, i.e., the mode of articulation of the social structure, which Marx gives us as equivalent to the previous determinations, from the point of view of its concept;

    -- the specific difference in the relation between labour and surplus-labour implied by the difference between the social relations in the feudal mode of production and in the capitalist mode of production (property/possession of the means of production): in the latter case there is a coincidence 'in space and time', simultaneously of labour and surplus-labour, but not in the former;

    -- the non-coincidence of the two processes, the labour process and the surplus-labour process, requires 'other than economic pressure' if surplus-labour is actually to be carried out;

 
page 222

    -- these other than economic pressures take the form of the feudal master/slave relationship.

    It seems to me that several conclusions follow.

    Firstly, Marx tells us that surplus-value exists in its visible, palpable form (in sichtbarer, handgreiflicher Form existiert ) in this mode of production, although surplus-value can only be recognized in its essence in the capitalist mode of production where it is hidden and therefore needs to be 'analysed'. Surplus-value is par excellence a category of the capitalist mode of production which takes its meaning from the analysis of the 'process of producing value ' (Verwertungsprozess ), i.e., of a production process whose aim is an increase in exchange value (the latter, by the same token, being generalized as a form of value).

    The justification for this statement is the fact that surplus-value is not a 'form ' in the same way that profit, rent and interest are; surplus-value is no more nor less than surplus-labour. The specific mode of exploitation of this surplus-labour in capitalist production, i.e., ultimately the mode of constitution of revenues (the mode of distribution), and therefore of the classes, is the constitution of profit, interest and capitalist rent, i.e., of what Marx calls the 'transformed forms' of surplus-value. In the capitalist mode of production, the forms of class struggle are first inscribed in the forms of the production process in general, they appear as a confrontation of forces within certain limits which are directly determined in the production process and analysable in it (limits of the working day, of wages, of profit and its sub-divisions).

    In other words, if we inquire about the structure of the class relations in a given society of which we have already said that it was distinguished by a certain mode of extraction of surplus-value, we are inquiring first of all about the 'transformed forms' peculiar to that society.[9]

    But it is no accident that the point which this passage singles out as the characteristic difference between the feudal mode of production and the capitalist mode of production -- the coincidence and non-coincidence of necessary labour and surplus-labour -- is also the essential point of the whole of Marx's analysis in Capital of the capitalist mode of production alone: this coincidence is another way of expressing the term by term coincidence of the labour process and the process of producing value. The distinction between constant capital and variable capital which defines the process of producing value will always be found to correspond to the distinction between labour power and means of production peculiar to the labour process. Many examples from Capital could be adduced to show how the analysis demands reference to this correspondence (notably in the whole analysis of turnover). The worker's

 
page 223

labour materially transforms raw materials into a product by setting to work the means of production; the same labour transfers to the product the value of the means of production and materials consumed, and produces a new value, part -- but only part -- of which is equal to the value of the labour-power. In the last analysis, therefore, the dual character of the production process, which expresses this coincidence, refers to the dual character of 'living' labour.

    It is easy to see that in the case Marx is describing here, the case of a form of feudal production, the coincidence exists in neither of the two forms: not only are labour and surplus-labour distinct 'in time and space', but even given a retrospective projection of the category of value, neither of the terms can strictly speaking be called a process of producing value.

    In other words:

    -- in the capitalist mode of production, the two processes coincide 'in time and space', which is an intrinsic feature of the mode of production (of the economic instance); this coincidence is itself the effect of the form of combination of the factors of the production process peculiar to the capitalist mode of production, i.e., of the form of the two relations of property and real appropriation. The corresponding 'transformed forms' in this social structure, i.e., the forms of the relations between classes, are then directly economic forms (profit, rent, wages, interest), which implies notably that the State does not intervene in them at this level.

    -- in the feudal mode of production there is a disjunction between the two processes 'in time and space', which is always an intrinsic feature of the mode of production (of the economic instance) and an effect of the form of combination peculiar to it (the property relation appears in it in the dual form of 'possession' and 'property'). Surplus-labour cannot then be extorted without 'other than economic pressure', i.e., without 'Herrschafts- und Knechtschafstverhältnis '. Even before we have analysed the 'transformed forms' for themselves, we can conclude that in the feudal mode of production they will not be the transformed forms of the economic base alone, but of the 'Herrschafts- und Knechtschaftsverhältnis '. Not directly economic, but directly and indissolubly political and economic ;[10] which means, finally, that different modes of production do not combine homogeneous elements, and do not allow differential divisions and definitions like the 'economic', the 'legal' and the 'political'. Historians and ethnologists today often attest the discovery of this effect, though usually in a theoretically blind fashion.

    We may also be able to understand why this politics was not conscious as such, why it did not think its relative autonomy, even in the moment when

 
page 224

it occupied the determinant place, either in the form of 'pure' violence, or in the forms of a law, because it emerged as one of the presuppositions of the mode of production itself. Indeed, as we know, this relative autonomy of politics was not recognized in thought until much later: it is peculiarly a 'bourgeois' thought.

    I think that it is possible to draw from this, one of Marx's most detailed texts, the principle explicitly present in Marx of a definition of the determination in the last instance of the economy. In different structures, the economy is determinant in that it determines which of the instances of the social structure occupies the determinant place. Not a simple relation, but rather a relation between relations; not a transitive causality, but rather a structural causality. In the capitalist mode of production it happens that this place is occupied by the economy itself; but in each mode of production, the 'transformation' must be analysed. Here I merely suggest that we could try to re-read the first pages of The Origins of the Family in this perspective, the pages in which Engels expresses the following notion which he presents as a mere 'correction' of Marx's general formulations:

    According to the materialist conception, the determining factor in history is, in the last resort, the production and reproduction of material life. But this itself is of a two-fold character. On the one hand, the production of the means of subsistence, of food, clothing and shelter and the tools requisite therefore; on the other, the production of human beings themselves, the propagation of the species. The social institutions under which men of a definite historical epoch and of a definite country live are conditioned by both kinds of production: by the stage of development of labour, on the one hand, and of the family, on the other. The less the development of labour . . . the more preponderatingly does the social order appear to be dominated by ties of sex (Marx-Engels: Selected Works, pp. 455-6).

 
page 228

or serfs, to acquire any independent property, or relatively speaking, wealth, under such circumstances. However, it is evident that tradition must play a dominant role in the primitive and undeveloped circumstance on which these social production relations and the corresponding mode of production are based. It is furthermore clear that here as always it is in the interest of the ruling section of society to sanction the existing order as law and legally to establish its limits given through usage and tradition. Apart from all else, this, by the way, comes about of itself as soon as the constant reproduction of the basis of the existing order and its fundamental relations assumes a regulated and orderly form in the course of time. And such regulation and order are themselves indispensable elements of any mode of production, if it is to assume social stability and indifference from mere chance and arbitrariness. These are precisely the form of its social stability and therefore its relative freedom from mere arbitrariness and mere chance. . . . It achieves this form by mere repetition of its own reproduction (Capital, Vol. III, pp. 773-4, modified).

    Since such gaps are possible, or more precisely, since contradictions are induced within the law itself by its non-correspondence with the relations of production, law must be distinct and second in order of analysis to the relations of production. And this is confirmed if we compare the passages where Marx reveals the specificity of 'bourgeois' property, e.g.:

    In each historical epoch, property has developed differently and under a set of entirely different social relations, thus to define bourgeois property is nothing else than to give an exposition of all the social relations of bourgeois production. To try to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a category apart, an abstract and eternal idea, can be nothing but an illusion of metaphysics or jurisprudence (Poverty of Philosophy, op. cit., p. 154).

 
page 229

Economic Formations that has already been quoted (and is a very legal text, both in its object and in its terminology), or else to a letter from Engels to Kautsky:

    Roman law was the consummate law of simple, i.e., pre-capitalist commodity production, which however included most of the legal relations of the capitalist period. Hence precisely what our city burghers needed at the time of their rise and did not find in the local law of custom (26 June 1884).

    It is difficult, firstly, to distinguish clearly between the relations of production and their 'legal expression'; this very concept of expression is difficult, too, once it no longer means duplication but rather the articulation of two heterogeneous instances; finally, so is the possible dislocation between the economic relations and the legal forms. All these preliminary difficulties are not accidental, they explain the method of investigation which must necessarily be followed here (and to which Marx himself shows the way, notably in his texts on pre-capitalist modes of production, which are closer to investigations than to systematic expositions). This method consists of looking for the relations of production behind the legal forms, or better: behind the secondary unity of production and law, which has to be disentangled. Only by this method will it eventually be possible to trace the theoretical boundary while still taking into account the ambivalent function that Marx assigns to legal forms: they are necessary and yet 'irrational', expressing and codifying the 'economic' reality which each mode of production defines in its own way, and yet simultaneously masking it. This represents a commitment to a regressive course -- another attempt to determine gaps or differences which will be expressed negatively on the basis of

 
page 230

the forms of the law, but this time within a completely self-contemporaneous system (a highly determinate mode of production: here the capitalist mode of production). Hence a difficult terminological problem as well, since the concepts in which the relations of production are expressed are precisely concepts in which the economic and the legal are indistinct, starting with the concept of property. What is 'property' insofar as it forms a system within the relatively autonomous structure of production, and logically precedes the law of property peculiar to the society considered? Such is the problem which must be initiated for capitalism too.

    This commitment to an analysis of the relations between the economic structure of the capitalist mode of production and the law that corresponds to it demands a complete study of its own: that is why I must be satisfied here by giving a few hints which will serve as reference points. The steps in a proof can be outlined as follows:

    (1) the whole of the economic structure of the capitalist mode of production from the immediate process of production to circulation and the distribution of the social product, presupposes the existence of a legal system ; the basic elements of which are the law of property and the law of contract. Each of the elements of the economic structure receives a legal qualification in the context of this system, notably the various elements of the immediate production process: the owner of the means of production, the means of production ('capital'), the 'free' labourer, and the process itself, characterized legally as a contract.

    (2) the peculiarity of the legal system we are discussing here (but not, of course, of every historical legal system) is its abstract universalistic character: by which I mean that this system simply distributes the concrete beings which can support its functions into two categories within each of which there is no pertinent distinction from the legal point of view: the category of human persons and the category of things. The property relation is established exclusively between human persons and things (or between what are reputed to be persons and what are reputed to be things); the contract relation is established exclusively between persons. Just as, in law, there is no diversity between persons, who are all or can all be owners and contractors, so there is no diversity between things, which are all or can all be property, whether they are means of labour or means of consumption, and whatever the use to which this property is put.

    (3) this universality of the legal system reflects, in the strict sense, another universality which is part of the economic structure: the universality of commodity exchange, which as we know is only realized on the basis of the capitalist mode of production (although the existence of commodity exchange and the forms that it implies are much older); only on the basis of the capitalist mode of production is the set of elements of the economic structure distributed entirely as commodities (including labour-power) and exchangers (including the direct producer). These two categories thus correspond adequately to those which define the legal system (persons and things).

 
page 231

    Thus the general problem of the relationship between the capitalist mode of production and the legal system which its functioning presupposes depends historically and theoretically on another problem: that of the relationship between the economic structure of the immediate process of production and the economic structure of the circulation of commodities. This necessary presence of 'commodity categories' in the analysis of the process of production explains the necessary presence of the corresponding legal categories.

    (4) the social relations of production which are part of the structure of the capitalist mode of production can be characterized on the basis of their legal expression, by comparison, uncovering a series of dislocations between them.

    Firstly, whereas the 'law of property' is characterized as universalistic, introducing no differences between the things possessed and their uses, the only property which is significant from the point of view of the structure of the production process is the ownership of the means of production, to the extent that, as Marx constantly reiterates, the latter function as means of production, i.e., are consumed productively, combined with 'living' labour and not hoarded or consumed unproductively. Whereas legal property is a right of consumption of any kind (in general: the right 'to use and abuse', i.e., to consume individually, to consume productively, to alienate -- exchange -- or to 'squander' -- Capital, Vol. III, p. 804), the economic ownership of the means of production is not so much a legal 'right' to them as the power to consume them productively, depending on their material nature, on their adaptation to the conditions of the labour process, as a means of appropriating surplus-labour. This power does not come down to a law, but, as Althusser has already suggested, to a distribution of the means of production (notably a suitable concentration in quantity and quality). The economic relation is not based on the indifference of 'things' (and, correlatively, of commodities ), but on an appreciation of their differences, which can be analysed according to two lines of opposition:

    elements of individual consumption
    elements of productive consumption

and:

    labour-power/means of production

(the reader will realize that this system of differences recurs in the analysis of the departments of aggregate social reproduction). Thus the gap between the social relations of production and the law of property can be characterized as a movement of extension or protraction, as an abolition of the divisions required by the structure of production: from 'ownership of the means of production' to property 'in general'.

    Secondly, the relationship established between the owner of the means of production (the capitalist) and the wage-labourer is, legally, a special form of contract: a labour contract. This is established on condition that labour is

 
page 232

legally reputed to be an exchange, i.e., that labour-power is legally reputed to be a 'commodity', or a thing. Note that in its concept this transformation of labour-power into a commodity and the establishment of the labour contract are completely independent of the nature of the labour in which the labour is consumed. That is why the legal form of the wage-earner is, just as before, a universal form which applies both to productive labour, the work of transformation that produces surplus-value, and to all the other forms of labour that can generally be designated by the term 'services'. But only 'productive' labour determines a relation of production, and productive labour cannot generally be defined by the relationship between the employer and the wage-earner, a relationship between 'persons': it presupposes that the economic sphere in which it takes place is taken into account (the sphere of immediate production, the source of surplus-value), i.e., the material nature of the labour and its objects, i.e., the nature of the means of labour with which it is combined. A few moments ago the ownership of the means of production, in the form of a legal relation between a person and a thing, appeared to us as a power over 'living' labour through the disposition of the means of production (which alone confer this power); in the same way, wage labour, insofar as it is a relationship inside the structure of production, in the legal form of a wage-service contract, appears to us now as a power over the means of production through the disposition of productive labour (which alone confers this power, i.e., determines an adequate consumption, not just any consumption). Thus the gap between wage labour as a social relation of production and the law of labour can be characterized as a movement of extension or protraction formally similar to the preceding one.

    Hence two conclusions of the first importance:

    -- whereas from the legal point of view (from the point of view of the law implied by the capitalist mode of production, of course) the property relation, a relation between a 'person' and a 'thing', and the contract relation, a relation between a 'person' and a 'person', are two distinct forms (even if they are based on a single system of categories), the same is no longer the case from the point of view of the economic structure: the ownership of the means of production and productive wage labour define a single connexion, a single relation of production. This follows directly from the two analyses outlined above.

    -- because this social relation is not legal in nature, although, for reasons that lie in the very nature of the capitalist mode of production, we are obliged (and Marx first of all) to describe it in the peculiar terminology of legal categories, it cannot be supported by the same concrete beings. The legal relations are universalistic and abstract: they are established between 'persons' and 'things' in general; it is the systematic structure of law which defines its supports as individuals (persons) confronted by things. Similarly, it is through their functions in the production process that the means of production are the supports of a connexion in the economic structure, and

 
page 233

this connexion (as opposed to property and contract) cannot be defined for individuals, but only for social classes or representatives of social classes. The definition of the capitalist class or of the proletarian class therefore does not precede that of the social relations of production, but vice versa, the definition of the social relations of production implies a 'support' function defined as a class.

    But a class cannot be the subject of property in the sense in which -- legally -- the individual is the subject of his property, nor a partner, nor 'third party', of a contract. We are not dealing here with the inherence of the object in its subject, or with the mutual recognition of subjects, but with the mechanism of the constant distribution of the means of production, hence with the entire capital and in consequence the entire social product (as Marx shows in the penultimate chapter of Volume Three of Capital : 'relations of production are relations of distribution'). Classes are not the subjects of this mechanism but its supports, and the concrete characteristics of these classes (their types of revenue, their internal stratification, their relations to the different levels of the social structure) are the effects of this mechanism. The economic relation of production appears therefore as a relation between three functionally defined terms: owner class/means of production/class of exploited producers. Confirmation of this may be found especially in Part 7 of Volume One ('The Accumulation of Capital'), where Marx shows how the mechanism of capitalist production, by productively consuming the means of production and the workers' labour power, produces the labourers' existence as an appendage of capital and makes the capitalist the instrument of accumulation, capital's functionary. There is nothing individual about this connexion, it is in consequence not a contract, but 'invisible threads' which bind the worker to the capitalist class, the capitalist to the working class (Capital, T.III, pp. 16, 20; Vol. I, pp. 573-4, 577-8). We therefore find that the social relation which determines the distribution of the means of production is instituted as a necessary relation between each individual of one class and the whole of the opposing class.

(2)  P R O D U C T I V E  F O R C E S  (H A N D I C R A F T S  A N D
      M E C H A N I Z A T I O N)

Among the general concepts to whose systematic articulation by Marx I referred in my analysis of the Preface to A Contribution, none, perhaps, presents such difficulties, despite all its apparent simplicity, as that of the productive forces, or, more exactly, of the level of the productive forces (or their degree of development). Indeed, the announcement of the concept alone immediately suggests two consequences which have been the source of fundamental misconstructions of Marx's theory, but of which it must be said that they are not easy to avoid: first, to speak of 'productive forces', 'forces' of production, immediately suggests the possibility of a list -- 'the productive forces are the population, the machines, science, etc.'; at the

 
page 234

same time, it suggests that the 'advance' of the productive forces may take the form of a cumulative progress, an addition of new productive forces or a replacement of certain of them by other, more 'powerful' ones (the craftsman's tool by the machine). This leads to an interpretation of the 'level' or 'degree of development' which is all the more tempting in that it seems to be implied by the words themselves: a linear and cumulative development, a quasi-biological continuity. But if that were so, how could we explain the historical discontinuities expressly contained in the general theory, except by a theory of 'qualitative change', of the transformation 'of quantity into quality', i.e., a descriptive theory of the pattern of a movement which does not suppress its general structure? How could we avoid a mechanistic theory of historical movement in which the 'dialectic' is merely another name for a periodic, and periodically compensated and adjusted, dislocation or lateness of the other instances with respect to this development against which they are measured?

    However, such a distribution quickly runs into remarkable difficulties: and all of them are related to the heteronomy of the 'elements' that must be added together to make Marx's concept coincide directly with a description of the 'facts'. Marx's bourgeois critics have not failed to note that the 'productive forces' ultimately include not only technical instruments, but also the application of scientific knowledge to the perfection and replacement of those instruments, and ultimately science itself; not only a population of working strengths, but also the technical and cultural customs of this population, which history (for earlier modes of production) and industrial social psychology show to be more and more historically and sociologically 'dense' and complex; not only techniques, but also a certain organization of labour, or even a social and political organization ('planning' is an obvious example), etc. These are not arbitrary difficulties: they reflect the fact that Marx's concept cannot be made to coincide with the categories of a sociology which, for its part, does proceed by the distribution and adding together of levels -- the technological, the economic, the legal, the social, the psychological, the political, etc. -- and which bases its peculiar historical classifications on these distributions (traditional societies and industrial societies, liberal societies and centralized-totalitarian societies, etc.). Moreover, these difficulties provide us with an index to an essential formal difference between Marx's concept and categories of this kind: the fact that the concept of the productive forces has nothing to do with a distribution of this type. We must therefore start looking for its real features.

    First let us stop and examine Marx's formulation itself: 'level' and 'degree', are certainly expressions which suggest the possibility of at least a notional measurement, and the measurement of a growth. These expressions are thought to characterize the essence of the productive forces, and in consequence to define them in the specificity of a historical mode of production. But it is a common-place to note that the productivity of any

 
page 235

labour, i.e., the 'measure' of this development, increased more in a few decades of industrial capitalism than in centuries of previous modes of production, whereas the 'relations' of production and the legal and political forms maintained a comparable rate of change; the same is true of the transformation of the means of labour (the equipment) which Marx calls the 'Gradmesser der Entwicklung der menschlichen Arbeitskraft '. Besides, Marx says much more correctly, and whenever this level plays a direct part in economic analysis: the productive power of labour, the productivity of the power of labour (Produktivkraft ).

    In other words, as we shall see, the 'productive forces' are not really things. If they were things, the problem of their transport, their importation, would, paradoxically enough, be easier to resolve for bourgeois sociology (with the exception of a few 'psychological' problems of cultural adaptation) than it is for Marx -- since his theory claims that there is a necessary connexion or correlation between certain productive forces and a certain type of society (defined by its social relations). Bypassing the verbal illusion created by the term, we can already say that the most interesting aspect of the 'productive forces' is no longer their distribution or composition, but the rhythm and pattern of their development, for this rhythm is directly linked to the nature of the relations of production, and the structure of the mode of production. What Marx proved, notably in Capital, and what is alluded to in some well-known sentences in the Manifesto, is not the fact that capitalism has liberated the development of the productive forces once and for all, but the fact that capitalism has imposed on the productive forces a determinate type of development whose rhythm and pattern are peculiar to it, dictated by the form of the process of capitalist accumulation. It is this pattern which best characterizes, descriptively, a mode of production, rather than the level attained at any moment. ('The law of increased productivity of labour is not, therefore, absolutely valid for capital. So far as capital is concerned, productivity does not increase through a saving in living labour, but only through a saving in the paid portion of living labour, as compared to labour expended in the past' -- Capital, Vol. III, p. 257).

    But from the theoretical point of view, the 'productive forces', too, are a connexion of a certain type within the mode of production, in other words, they, too, are a relation of production : precisely the one I have tried to suggest by introducing into the constitutive connexions inside the mode of production, as well as a 'property' connexion, a connexion, B, of 'real appropriation', between the same elements: means of production, direct producers, even 'non-labourers', i.e., in the context of the capitalist mode of production, the non-wage-earners. I should now like to show that this really is a connexion, or more rigorously a relation of production, by tracing the analysis to be found in the chapters of Capital devoted to the methods of formation of relative surplus-value; at the same time, we shall see better what the differential analysis of forms is.

 
page 236

    Marx's analysis takes up three chapters of Capital (Volume One, Chapters XIII, XIV and XV in the English translation) which are devoted to the forms of co-operation in manufacture and modern industry, and the transition from the one to the other which constitutes the 'industrial revolution'. But this development is incomprehensible unless we refer it on the one hand to the definition of the labour process (Volume One, Chapter VII) and on the other to Chapter XVI of Volume One ('Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value') which is its conclusion.

    The transition from manufacture to modern industry inaugurates what Marx calls the 'specific mode of production' of capitalism, or again the 'real subsumption' of labour beneath capital. In other words, modern industry constitutes the form of our connexion which belongs organically to the capitalist mode of production.

    At first, capital subordinates labour on the basis of the technical conditions given by historical development. It does not change immediately the mode of production. The production of surplus-value in the form considered by us -- by means of a simple extension of the working day, proved, therefore, to be independent of any change in the mode of production itself (Capital, T.I, p. 303; Vol. I, p. 310).
    The production of relative surplus-value revolutionizes out and out the technical processes of labour, and the forms of social grouping (die gesellschaftlichen Gruppierungen ). It therefore presupposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production, a mode which, along with its methods, means and conditions, arises and develops itself spontaneously on the basis provided by the formal subsumption of labour under capital. In the case of this development, the formal subsumption is replaced by the real subsumption of labour under capital (Capital, Vol. I, p. 510, retranslated from Marx-Engels: Werke, Bd. XXIII, pp. 532-3).

    Firstly, the difference between formal subsumption and 'real' subsumption indicates the existence of a chronological dislocation in the formation of the different elements of the structure: capital as a 'social relation', i.e., the capitalist ownership of the means of production, exists before and independently of the 'real' subsumption, i.e., the specific form of our connexion (real appropriation) which corresponds to the capitalist mode of production. The explanation for this dislocation and for the possibility of such dislocations in general is found in a theory of the forms of transition from one mode of production to another, which I shall leave aside for the moment. Let me merely underline the following: the simple, purely chronological dislocation is indifferent to the theory that we are studying; the 'synchrony' in which the concept of a mode of production is given simply suppresses this aspect of temporality and hence excludes from the theory of history every mechan-

 
page 237

ical form of thought where time is concerned (any theory which asserts that anything featured at the same level in a chart of chronological concordances belong to the same time). Not only is there a dislocation between the emergence of the capitalist ownership of the means of production and the 'industrial revolution', but the industrial revolution is itself dislocated from one branch of production to another. The second dislocation is also suppressed by the theory. Finally, within a single branch, it proceeds by successive replacements of manual labour by 'mechanized' labour, in a rhythm subject to structural and conjunctural economic necessities; so much so that the 'transition' which is our object here appears as a tendency in the strict sense Marx gave that term, i.e., as a structural property of the capitalist mode of production: the essence of the 'productive forces' in the capitalist mode of production is to be constantly in the process of transition from manual labour to mechanized labour.

    Let us recall in what this transition from manufacture to modern industry consists.

    Both are forms of co-operation between the labourers (the direct producers), and this co-operation is only possible through their subjection to capital, which employs them all simultaneously. Both therefore constitute what can be called organisms of production, instituting a 'collective labourer': the labour process which is defined by the delivery of a finished use product (whether this use be an individual consumption or a productive consumption) requires the intervention of several labourers in a specific form of organization. Manufacture and modern industry are thus equally opposed to the individual handicraft. However, that is not the real break.

    All co-operation may take simple or complex forms: in simple co-operation, there is a juxtaposition of labourers and operations. 'Numerous labourers work together side by side, whether in one and the same process, or in different but connected processes.' This form of co-operation is still found, particularly in agriculture. In the workshop of the guild master, the labour of the journeymen is usually performed in simple co-operation. The same is true of the primitive forms of manufacture, which consist simply in gathering the artisans into a single place of work. Complex co-operation, on the contrary, consists of an imbrication, of an intertwining of the labour. The operations performed by each worker successively or simultaneously are complementary, and only together do they give birth to a finished product. This form of co-operation (which is found in quite distant times in some sectors, e.g., metallurgy) constitutes the essence of the division of labour in manufacture: one piece of work is divided among the workers (until the eighteenth century this was called a single 'oeuvre ' or 'ouvrage ' in France).

    Obviously, this division may have different origins. It may derive from a real 'division', after the complex operations of a single handicraft have been shared out among different labourers who thus become specialists in one fraction of the labour: or it may derive from the junction of several different

 
page 238