By Xabier Arrizabalo Montoro
The mode of production is the historic form of organization through which every society confronts the first determination that it must face to assure its survival: the production of its means of subsistence (which must be produced because they’re not directly available in nature, so nature must consequently be transformed through work).
It’s the production of the means of subsistence, their distribution among the members of a society, and their consumption by members of a society in order to be in the condition to reproduce them. And so on in order to renew the material basis of societal reproduction.
Examples of modes of production are communal forms, slavery, feudalism, capitalism, and also socialism and communism even though they haven’t completely existed until now. The objective of political economics is the analysis of modes of production, identifying a society by the mode of production that dominates over others, which are subordinated. For example, patriarchal relationships or other non-commercial or commercial forms of production today are subordinate to the capitalist relationships of production with which they coexist.