Relations of production: Encyclopedia II - Relations of production - Definitions

Relations of production - Definitions

A social relation can be defined, in the first instance, as

• a relation between individuals insofar as they belong to a group, or
• a relation between groups, or
• a relation between an individual and a group.

The group could be an ethnic or kinship group, a social institution or organisation, a social class, a nation or gender etc.

A social relation is therefore not simply identical with an interpersonal relation or an individual relation, although all these types of relations presuppose each other. A social relation refers to a common social characteristic of a group of people.

Society for Marx is the sum total of social relations connecting its members.

Social relations of production in Marx's sense refer to

• (often legally encoded) ownership & control relations pertaining to society's productive assets, *the way people are formally and informally associated within the economic sphere of production, including as social classes,
• work relations (including household labor),
• socio-economic dependencies between people arising from the way they produce and reproduce their existence,
• the quantitative proportions of different aspects of the sphere of production, considered from the point of view of society as a whole.

The totality of social relations of production constitute the social structure of the economy, which according to Marx determine how incomes, products and assets will be distributed.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Definitions", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki