*** Observation 1: The concept of the ‘mode of production’ was distinctly under-formulated

*** Observation 2: The concept of the ‘mode of production’ largely dissolved when removed from the framework of the state

*** Observation 3: The main result of the eclipse of the mode of production concept has been a naturalization of capitalism; this becomes particularly evident when looking at the way ‘Continuationists’ treat wage labor and slavery

*** Thesis 1: The key mistake of the mode of production model was to define ‘production’ simply as the production of material objects; any adequate theory of ‘production’ would have to give at least equal place to the production of people and social relations

*** Thesis 2: If one applies Marx’s analysis of value in capital to the production of people and social relations, one can more easily see some of the mechanisms which obscure the most important forms of labor that exist in most societies, and the real stakes of human existence, thus allowing ‘scientific’ observers to reduce human beings to automatons competing over abstractions like ‘wealth’ or ‘power’

*** Thesis 3: One of the great insights of world-systems analysis is to show how very simple forms of social relation most typical of long-distance relations between people who do not know much about each other are continually introjected within those societies to simplify social relations that need not be that way

*** Thesis 4: If one reinterprets a ‘mode of production’ to mean a relation between surplus extraction and the creation of human beings, then it is possible to see industrial capitalism as an introjected form of the slave mode of production, with a structurally analogous relation between workplace and domestic sphere

*** Thesis 5: Capitalism’s unlimited demand for growth and profit is related to the transcendent abstraction of the corporate form. In any society, the dominant forms are considered transcendent from reality in much the way value forms tend to be and when these transcendent forms encounter ‘material’ reality, their demands are absolute

*** References