Recognition and Social Relations
of Production
Andrew Chitty
“Social relation of production’ is a key term in Marx's theory of history,
for the social relations of production of a society give that society its
fundamental character and make it, for example, a capitalist rather than
some other kind of society." In Marx's words:
‘The social relations within which (humans) produce, the
soci! relations of production [geselischafiliche
Produktionverhdliise) .. i their totality form what are
called socal relations, society, and specifically a society at @
‘determinate historical stage of development, a society with @
peculiar, distinctive character. Ancient society, feudal society,
bourgeois society are such totlites of relations of
production, each of which a the same time denotes a special
‘tage of development in the history of mankind?
For Marx the major institutions of a historical epoch — specifically its
legal and political systems — are deeply conditioned by its social
relations of production. In his metaphor from the 1859 Preface, the
social relations of production form a ‘base’ and these institutions a
‘superstructure’ which arises out of i? Accordingly his general strategy
for explaining these institutions is to show how the relations of
production give rise to them. The base is explanans and the
superstructure is explanandum, and to say that some aspect of socal life
‘belongs to the base ofthe superstructure is simply to say what its role is
this conditioning process, and so in Marx’s explanation of socal
institutions.
However Mark never says in so many words just what social
relations of production are, and the concept has been strongly criticised
by non-Marxsts. In some places Marx appears to equate them with
property relations: in Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality he
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states that ‘private property .. consists in the totality of the bourgeois
relations of production’. and in the 1859 Preface to the Contribution to
the Critique of Political Economy he says that property relations are
‘only a legal expression for’ relations of production. Yet if property
relations are legal relations — and this is the most obvious way to
understand them ~ then they cannot be identical with social relations of
production, for the legal system is meant to be part of the
superstructure of society, the character of which is explained by the
relations of production, Legel property relations would have to make up
the base and yet also belong to the superstructure. This difficulty has
‘been called the ‘problem of legality’ Problems like it have given rise to
the criticism that the very idea of ‘social relations of production’
Marx is incoherent, or as Plamenetz put it, that i is ‘a phrase used not
to express thought but to cover up its absence, and is therefore not to be
rendered into meaningful English’?
‘The best-known Marxist response to the problem of legality is G.A.
Cohen's in Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. Cohen