Relations of production

Common card · No. 431957

Relations of production (German: Produktionsverhältnisse) It is first explicitly used in Marx's published book The Poverty of Philosophy, although Marx and Engels had already defined the term in The German Ideology which was only published posthumously in 1932. Some social relations are voluntary or freely chosen (i.e. a person chooses to associate with another person or a group). But other social relations are involuntary, i.e. people can be socially related, whether they like that or not, because they are part of a family (i.e. biosocial kinship) a group, an organization, a community, a nation, etc. By "relations of production", Marx and Engels meant the sum total of social relationships that people must enter into in order to survive, to produce, and to reproduce their means of life. As people must enter into these social relationships, i.e. because participation in them is not voluntary, the totality of these relationships, along with the forces of production, constitute a relatively...

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