Mode of Production

Definition

In The Mirror of Production the mode of production is the concept under attack — the device by which historical materialism claims to decipher every society, and which Baudrillard says is simply our own organization of production projected onto all history. The projection thesis is stated as a formula: "Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history; it is the vision of a future 'freedom' based on the conscious domination of nature. These are extrapolations of the economic" (ch. II, "Epistemology II: Structural Limits of the Marxist Critique", pp. 65–68). Its anthropological result is that other societies are found to be defective copies: "Historical materialism does not know how to grasp earlier societies in their symbolic articulation. It only finds in them what it could find under its own light, that is, its artificial mode of production" (ch. IV, "Epistemology IV: Marxism and Miscomprehension", p. 107).

The concept is also diagnosed as a retroactive or structural model, not an observation. Our epoch "produces the universal abstraction of the concept of labor and the retrospective illusion of the validity of this concept for all societies" (ch. III, "Epistemology III: Materialism and Ethnocentrism"); and where Marx takes the anatomy of man as the key to the anatomy of the ape, Baudrillard answers that the structure of the model is what yields the appearance of illumination — "the specificity of the anthropological object is precisely the impossibility of defining the economic and the mode of production as a separated instance" (ch. III, "Structural Causality and the Primitives").

Most of the book's polemic is aimed not at Marx but at the adjustments by which Marxist anthropology saves the concept. Of Maurice Godelier: "By an adjustment of the concept of mode of production, Marxist anthropology thus seeks from beginning to end to preserve materialist orthodoxy against the heresy of primitive societies" (ch. III, "Structural Causality and the Primitives"). Godelier's formula that "the relations of kinship function both as elements of the infrastructure and as superstructure," and his concession that "under certain conditions, kinship is economy, and religion can function directly as a relation of production," are read as preserving the hierarchy rather than questioning it: "this facile cleverness saves the 'dialectical' grid which establishes the economy as the determinant instance" (same section; see determinant-instance). The infra/superstructure distinction therefore emerges as the argument's real object: the grid that survives every adjustment.

The outcome is named "materialism and ethnocentrism": any analysis built on a "latent hierarchy placing the determinant instance at the heart of the process of development, as separated functions, as distinctive oppositions ruled by the code, whether traditional or Marxist" — carries, Baudrillard says, "an incurable ethnocentrism of the code. It is at this price that 'materialist' analysis aspires to be a science, to be intelligible; but this intelligibility is that of its own code" (ch. IV, "Epistemology IV"). And the concept's own validity for us is put in question. The third-phase analysis asks flatly, "Are we always within the capitalist mode of production?", adding that "the radical hypothesis no longer accepts this fundamental concept, seeing it as an arbitrary aspect of a certain model" (ch. V, "The Third Phase of Political Economy"; cf. the "still more radical hypothesis" of Cardan/Castoriadis, ch. IV, "Epistemology IV", that historical materialism's categories may "no longer have any meaning for us").

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the critic: the mode of production as projection, retrospective illusion, and "incurable ethnocentrism of the code" (1973/1975).
• Karl Marx — the concept's author, credited with the concept's strategic irruption against political economy's imaginary universality and charged with its universalization thereafter.
• Maurice Godelier (not yet paged) — the principal antagonist: kinship as both infrastructure and superstructure; production as "determinant in the last instance"; the adjustments the book calls acrobatics.
• Cornélius Castoriadis, writing as "Cardan" (not yet paged) — source of the "still more radical hypothesis" that the categories have no meaning even for us, and of the substitution of "participation" for the productive-forces/relations contradiction.
• Louis Althusser (not yet paged) — the adjacent scientific Marxism whose instance-structure the book treats as the same grid under another name (see structuralism).
• Marshall Sahlins (not yet paged) — cited for the primitive "affluent society," which makes the absence of surplus intelligible without the concept of an undeveloped mode of production.

Related Concepts

• historical-materialism-critique — the general argument of which the attack on this concept is the load-bearing case.
• primitive-societies-as-alterity — the anthropology the projection destroys.
• determinant-instance — the hierarchy the "adjustments" preserve: economy as instance, kinship as expression.
• artisanal-mode — the adjacent case in which the concept's retrospection is worked out (slave, artisan, wage labor).
• labor-power — the other concept of the same family: the productive potential the mode of production actualizes.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the concept's critique in full: "Marxism is the projection of the class struggle and the mode of production onto all previous history" (ch. II, pp. 65–68); "there is neither a mode of production nor production in primitive societies" (ch. I, pp. 47–48); Godelier's infra/superstructure adjustments and their preservation of "the economy as the determinant instance" (ch. III, "Structural Causality and the Primitives"); and the "incurable ethnocentrism of the code" (ch. IV, "Epistemology IV").
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• If the mode of production is an "arbitrary aspect of a certain model," what does Baudrillard put in its place as a description of our own society? The answer given is the code and the form-sign, not a better historical schema.
• Is the ethnocentrism charge made against the content of the concept or against the separability of instances it presupposes? Baudrillard says the latter is the specificity of the anthropological object, which would make the critique independent of any particular ethnography.
• Why is the "adjustment" strategy illegitimate? Godelier is accused of circularity, but the book does not specify what a non-circular comparative concept of production would look like.
• Does the disappearance of the concept leave any room for historical explanation at all — and does Baudrillard's own third-phase periodisation reintroduce a mode-of-production schema in sign-theoretic dress? See form-sign.