SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATION - a stage of progressive development of human society, representing the totality of all social phenomena in their organic unity and interaction based on a given method of production of material goods; one of the main categories of historical materialism...
Soviet historical encyclopedia. In 16 volumes. - M.: Soviet Encyclopedia. 1973-1982. Volume 10. NAHIMSON - PERGAMUS. 1967.
Socio-economic formation (Lopukhov, 2013)
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATION is one of the fundamental categories of Marxist sociology, which considers society at any stage of its development as an integrity arising on the basis of a certain mode of production. In the structure of each formation, an economic base and a superstructure were distinguished. Basis (or production relations) - a set of social relations that develop between people in the process of production, exchange, distribution and consumption of material goods (the main ones among them are relations of ownership of the means of production).
Social formations (NFE, 2010)
SOCIAL FORMATIONS - a category of Marxism, denoting the stages of historical development of society, establishing a certain logic of the historical process. The main characteristics of a social formation: mode of production, system of social relations, social structure, etc. The development of countries and individual regions is richer than the definition of their belonging to any formation; formational characteristics in each case are specified and supplemented by the peculiarities of social structures - socio-political institutions, culture, law, religion, morality, customs, morals, etc.
Socio-economic formation (1988)
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATION is a historically specific type of society, based on a specific mode of production, characterized by its economic basis, political, legal, ideological superstructure, and its forms of social consciousness. Each socio-economic formation represents a certain historical stage in the progressive development of mankind. There are socio-economic formations: primitive communal (see. ), slaveholding (see. ), feudal (see ), capitalist (see , Imperialism, General crisis of capitalism) and communist (see. , ). All socio-economic formations have specific laws of origin and development. So, each of them has its own basic economic law. There are also general laws that apply in all or many socio-economic formations. This includes the law of increasing labor productivity, the law of value (arises during the period of decomposition of the primitive communal system, disappears under conditions of complete communism). At a certain stage in the development of society, the continuously developing productive forces reach a level where the existing relations of production become their fetters...
Slave formation (Podoprigora)
SLAVE FORMATION - a social system based on slavery and slave ownership; the first antagonistic socio-economic formation in the history of mankind. Slavery is a phenomenon that existed in different historical conditions. In the slave-owning formation, slave labor plays the role of the dominant mode of production. Countries in whose history historians discover the presence of a slave-owning formation are: Egypt, Babylonia, Assyria, Persia; states of Ancient India, Ancient China, Ancient Greece and Italy.
Socio-economic formation (Orlov)
SOCIO-ECONOMIC FORMATION is a fundamental category in Marxism - a stage (period, era) in the development of human society. It is characterized by a combination of economic base, socio-political and ideological superstructure (forms of statehood, religion, culture, moral and ethical standards). A type of society that represents a special stage in its development. Marxism views the history of mankind as a successive change of primitive communal, slave systems, feudalism, capitalism and communism - the highest form of social progress.
Socio-economic formation- in Marxism - a stage of social evolution, characterized by a certain stage of development of the productive forces of society and the historical type of economic production relations corresponding to this stage, which depend on it and are determined by it. There are no formational stages of development of productive forces to which the types of production relations determined by them would not correspond.
Socio-economic formations in Marx
Karl Marx did not postulate that the issue of socio-economic formations was finally resolved and identified different formations in different works. In the preface to “A Critique of Political Economy” (1859), Marx called “progressive eras of economic social formation”, which were determined by social modes of production, among which were named:
- Asiatic;
- Antique;
- Feudal;
- Capitalist.
In his later works, Marx considered three “modes of production”: “Asian”, “ancient” and “Germanic”, but the “Germanic” mode of production was not included in the officially recognized five-member scheme of periodization of history.
Five-part scheme ("five-member")
Although Marx did not formulate a complete theory of socio-economic formations, a generalization of his statements became the basis for Soviet historians (V.V. Struve and others) to conclude that he identified five formations in accordance with the prevailing relations of production and forms of ownership:
- primitive communal;
- slaveholding;
- feudal;
- capitalist;
- communist.
This concept was formulated in the popular work of F. Engels “The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State” and after the canonization of J.V. Stalin’s work “On Dialectical and Historical Materialism” (1938) it began to reign supreme among Soviet historians.
Feudalism
In society, there is a class of feudal lords - land owners - and a class of peasants dependent on them, who are in personal dependence. Production, mainly agricultural, is carried out by the labor of dependent peasants exploited by feudal lords. Feudal society is characterized by a class social structure. The main mechanism that motivates people to work is serfdom, economic coercion.
Capitalism
Socialism
In the five-member formational scheme, socialism was considered as the first phase of the highest - communist - social formation.
This is the communist society, which has just emerged from the womb of capitalism, which bears in all respects the imprint of the old society and which Marx calls the “first” or lower phase of communist society.
Backward countries can move to socialism bypassing capitalism in the course of a non-capitalist path of development.
The development of socialism is divided into a transitional period, socialism, mainly built, developed socialism.
Marx and Engels did not assign socialism the place of a separate socio-economic formation. The terms “socialism” and “communism” themselves were synonymous and denoted a society following capitalism.
We are not dealing with a communist society that has developed on its own basis, but with one that has just emerged from capitalist society and which therefore in all respects, economic, moral and mental, still retains the birthmarks of the old society. from the depths of which it came.
Full communism
Complete communism is the “reverse appropriation, reconquest” by man of his objective essence, opposing him in the form of capital, and “the beginning of the true history of mankind.”
...after the subordination of man to the division of labor that enslaves him disappears; when the opposition between mental and physical labor disappears along with it; when work will cease to be only a means of living, but will itself become the first need of life; when, along with the all-round development of individuals, the productive forces grow and all sources of social wealth flow in full flow, only then will it be possible to completely overcome the narrow horizon of bourgeois law, and society will be able to write on its banner: “To each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.”
Communism
The communist formation in its development goes through the phase of socialism and the phase of complete communism.
Discussions about socio-economic formations in the USSR
Asian production method
The existence of the Asian mode of production as a separate formation was not generally recognized and was a topic of discussion throughout the existence of historical materialism in the USSR. It is also not mentioned everywhere in the works of Marx and Engels.
Among the early stages of class society, a number of scientists, based on some statements of Marx and Engels, highlight, in addition to the slave and feudal modes of production, a special Asian mode of production and the formation corresponding to it. However, the question of the existence of such a method of production has caused discussion in philosophical and historical literature and has not yet received a clear solution.
G. E. Glerman, Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 2nd ed., vol. 30, p. 420
In the later stages of the existence of primitive society, the level of production made it possible to create a surplus product. Communities united into large entities with centralized management. Of these, a class of people gradually emerged, exclusively occupied with management. This class became isolated, accumulated privileges and material wealth in its hands, which led to the emergence of private property and property inequality. The transition to slavery became possible and productively more profitable. The administrative apparatus is becoming increasingly complex, gradually transforming into a state.
Four-term scheme
The Soviet Marxist historian V.P. Ilyushechkin in 1986 proposed, based on the logic of Marx, to distinguish not five, but four formations (he classified the feudal and slaveholding formations as one class-class formation, as such, where manual labor corresponded to the consumer-value type industrial relations). Ilyushechkin believed that within the framework of pre-capitalist political economy we can only talk about a single pre-capitalist formation, which was characterized by a pre-capitalist mode of production.
Theory at the present stage
According to Kradin, the theory of socio-economic formations has been in a state of crisis since the 1990s: “By the mid-1990s. we can talk about the scientific death of the five-member formation scheme. Even its main defenders in the last decades of the 20th century. admitted its inconsistency. V. N. Nikiforov in October 1990, shortly before his death, at a conference dedicated to the peculiarities of the historical development of the East, publicly admitted that the four-stage concepts of Yu. M. Kobishchanov or V. P. Ilyushechkin more adequately reflect the course of the historical process.”
The concept of socio-economic formation.
| Parameter name | Meaning |
| Article topic: | The concept of socio-economic formation. |
| Rubric (thematic category) | Philosophy |
Socio-economic formation – a category of social philosophy of Marxism (historical materialism), reflecting the patterns of historical development of society, ascending from simple primitive social forms of development to more progressive ones, a historically specific type of society. This concept also reflects the social action of the categories and laws of dialectics, marking the natural and inevitable transition of humanity from the “kingdom of necessity to the kingdom of freedom” - to communism. The category of socio-economic formation was developed by Marx in the first versions of Capital, Towards a Critique of Political Economy, and in Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1857 - 1859. In its most developed form it is presented in ʼʼCapitalʼʼ. The thinker believed that all societies, despite their specificity (which Marx never denied), go through the same steps or stages of social development - socio-economic formations. Moreover, each socio-economic formation is a special social organism, different from other social organisms (formations). In total, he identifies five such formations: primitive communal, slaveholding, feudal, capitalist and communist; which the early Marx reduces to three: public (without private property), private property and again public, but at a higher level of social development. Marx believed that economic relations and the mode of production are decisive in social development, according to which he named formations. The thinker became the founder of the formational approach in social philosophy, who believed that there are general social patterns of development of various societies.
The socio-economic formation consists of the economic basis of society and the superstructure, interconnected and interacting with each other. The main thing in this interaction is the economic basis, the economic development of society. The economic basis of society – the defining element of the socio-economic formation, which represents the interaction of the productive forces of society and production relations. The productive forces of society - the forces with the help of which the production process is carried out, consisting of man as the main productive force and the means of production (buildings, raw materials, machines and mechanisms, production technologies, etc.). Industrial relations – relations between people that arise in the production process, related to their place and role in the production process, the relationship of ownership of the means of production, and their relationship to the product of production. As a rule, the one who owns the means of production plays a decisive role in production; the rest are forced to sell their labor power. The specific unity of the productive forces of society and production relations forms mode of production, determining the economic basis of society and the entire socio-economic formation as a whole. Rising above the economic base superstructure, which is a system of ideological social relations, expressed in forms of social consciousness, in views, theories of illusions, feelings of various social groups and society as a whole. The most significant elements of the superstructure are law, politics, morality, art, religion, science, philosophy. The superstructure is determined by the basis, but it can have the opposite effect on the basis. The transition from one socio-economic formation to another is associated, first of all, with the development of the economic sphere, the dialectics of the interaction of productive forces and production relations. In this interaction, productive forces are the dynamically developing content, and production relations are the form that allows productive forces to exist and develop. At a certain stage, the development of the productive forces comes into conflict with the old relations of production, and then the time comes for a social revolution, carried out as a result of the class struggle. With the replacement of old production relations by new ones, the mode of production and the economic basis of society change. With a change in the economic base, the superstructure also changes, therefore, there is a transition from one socio-economic formation to another.
K. Marx developed his basic idea about the natural historical process of development of society by singling out economic from various areas of social life, and from all social relations - production as the main and determining other relations1.
Taking as a starting point the fact of obtaining the means of life, Marxism connected with it the relations into which people enter into the production process, and in the system of these production relations it saw the basis - the basis of a certain society - which is clothed with political-legal superstructures and various forms of social thought .
Each system of production relations that arises at a certain stage of development of productive forces is subject to both general laws for all formations and special laws peculiar to only one of them, the laws of emergence, functioning and transition to a higher form. The actions of people within each socio-economic formation were generalized by Marxism and reduced to the actions of large masses, in a class society - classes, realizing in their activities the urgent needs of social development.
A socio-economic formation is, according to Marxism, a historical type of society, based on a certain method of production and which is a stage in the progressive development of humanity from the primitive communal system through the slave system, feudalism and capitalism to the communist formation. The concept of "socio-economic formation" is the cornerstone of the Marxist understanding of history. In this case, one formation is replaced by another as a result of a social revolution. Capitalist society, according to Marxism, is the last of the formations based on class antagonism. It ends the prehistory of humanity and begins true history - communism.
Types of formations
Marxism distinguishes five types of socio-economic formations.
The primitive communal system is a primary (or archaic) social formation, the structure of which is characterized by the interaction of communal and related forms of community of people. This formation covers the time from the origin of social relations to the emergence of class society. With a broad interpretation of the concept of “primary formation”, the beginning of the primitive communal system is considered to be the phase of the primitive herd, and the final stage is the society of communal statehood, where class differentiation has already emerged. Primitive communal relations reach their greatest structural completeness during the period of the tribal system, formed by the interaction of the tribal community and the clan. The basis of production relations here was the common ownership of the means of production (tools of production, land, as well as housing, household equipment), within which there was also personal ownership of weapons, household items, clothing, etc. Existing in the conditions of the initial stages of technical development of humanity, collective forms of property, religious and magical ideas, primitive relations are replaced by new social relations as a result of the improvement of tools, forms of economy, the evolution of family, marriage and other relations.
The slave system is the first class antagonistic society that arose on the ruins of the primitive communal system. Slavery, according to Marxism, existed in one form or another in all countries and among all peoples. Under the slave system, the main productive force of society is slaves, and the ruling class is the slave-owning class, which is divided into different social groups (landowners, traders, moneylenders, etc.). In addition to these two main classes - slaves and slave owners - in a slave-owning society there are intermediate layers of the free population: small owners who live by their labor (artisans and peasants), as well as the lumpen proletariat, formed from ruined artisans and peasants. The basis of the prevailing production relations of a slave-owning society is the slave owner's private ownership of the means of production and slaves. With the emergence of a slave-owning society, the state arises and develops. With the disintegration of the slave-owning system, the class struggle intensifies and the slave-owning form of exploitation is replaced by another - feudal.
Feudalism (from the Latin feodum - estate) is the middle link in the change of formations between the slave system and capitalism. It arises through the synthesis of elements of the decomposition of primitive communal and slave relations. Three types of this synthesis are observed: with a predominance of the first, the second, or with a uniform ratio of them. The economic system of feudalism is characterized by the fact that the main means of production - land - is in the monopoly ownership of the ruling class of feudal lords, and the economy is carried out by small producers - peasants. The political structure of feudal society at different stages of its development is different: from the smallest state fragmentation to highly centralized absolutist monarchies. The late period of feudalism (the descending stage of its development as a system) is characterized, according to Marxism, by the emergence in its depths of manufacturing production - the beginning of capitalist relations and the time of maturation and accomplishment of bourgeois revolutions.
Capitalism is a socio-economic formation that replaces feudalism. Capitalism is based on private ownership of the means of production and the exploitation of wage labor. The main contradiction of capitalism - between the social nature of labor and the private capitalist form of appropriation - finds expression, according to Marxism, in the antagonism between the main classes of capitalist society - the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. The culmination of the class struggle of the proletariat is the socialist revolution.
Socialism and communism represent two phases of the communist formation: socialism is its first, or lower, phase; communism is the highest phase. According to Marxist teaching, the basis of their differences lies in the degree of economic maturity. Already under socialism there is no private ownership of the means of production and no exploitation of wage labor. In this respect there is no difference between socialism and communism. But under socialism, public ownership of the means of production exists in two forms: state and collective farm-cooperative; under communism there must be a single national property. Under socialism, according to Marxism, the differences between the working class, the collective farm peasantry and the intelligentsia, as well as between mental and physical labor, city and countryside disappear, and under communism, are preserved. At a certain stage of development of communism, according to Marxist teaching, political and legal institutions, ideology, and the state as a whole will completely wither away; communism will be the highest form of organization of society, which will function on the basis of highly developed productive forces, science, technology, culture and public self-government.
Dictionaries define a socio-economic formation as a historically specific type of society based on a specific mode of production. The method of production is one of the central concepts in Marxist sociology, characterizing a certain level of development of the entire complex of social relations. Karl Marx developed his basic idea of the natural historical development of society by isolating the economic sphere from various spheres of social life and giving it special significance - as the main one, to a certain extent determining all the others, and of all types of social relations, he paid primary attention to production relations - those , in which people enter into not only the production of material goods, but also their distribution and consumption.
The logic here is quite simple and convincing: the main and determining thing in the life of any society is obtaining the means to live, without which no other relationships between people - neither spiritual, nor ethical, nor political - will simply be possible - for without these means there will be no of people. And in order to obtain the means of living (to produce them), people must unite, cooperate, enter into certain relationships for joint activities, which are called production
According to Marx's analytical scheme, the mode of production includes the following components. The productive forces that form the core of the economic sphere are a general name for the connection of people with the means of production, i.e., with the totality of material resources at work: raw materials, tools, equipment, tools, buildings and structures used in the production of goods. The main component of the productive forces are, of course, people themselves with their knowledge, skills and abilities, which allow them, with the help of means of production, from objects of the surrounding natural world to produce objects intended directly to satisfy human needs - their own or other people.
Productive forces are the most flexible, mobile, continuously developing part of this unity. This is understandable: people’s knowledge and skills are constantly increasing, new discoveries and inventions are appearing, in turn improving tools. Production relations are more inert, inactive, slow in their change, but they form the shell, the nutrient medium in which the productive forces develop. The inextricable unity of productive forces and production relations is called the basis, since it serves as a kind of basis, a support for the existence of society.
A superstructure grows on the foundation of the base. It represents the totality of all other social relations, “remaining minus production ones,” containing many different institutions, such as the state, family, religion or various types of ideologies existing in society. The main specificity of the Marxist position is the assertion that the nature of the superstructure is determined by the nature of the base. Since the nature of the base (the deep nature of production relations) changes, the nature of the superstructure also changes. Because, for example, the political structure of a feudal society differs from the political structure of a capitalist state, because the economic life of these two societies is significantly different and requires different ways of influencing the state on the economy, different legal systems, ideological beliefs, etc.
A historically specific stage of development of a given society, which is characterized by a specific mode of production (including its corresponding superstructure), is called a socio-economic formation. The change in methods of production and the transition from one socio-economic formation to another is caused by the antagonism between outdated production relations and the continuously developing productive forces, which become cramped in these old frameworks, and they tear it apart just as a grown chick breaks the shell within which it developed.
The base-superstructure model has inspired a variety of teachings, ranging from 18th-century Romanticism to analysis of family structure in modern society. The predominant form that these teachings took was class-theoretical in nature. That is, the relations of production in the base were seen as relations between social classes (say, between workers and capitalists), and therefore the statement that the base determines the superstructure means that the nature of the superstructure is largely determined by the economic interests of the dominant social class. This emphasis on classes seemed to “remove” the question of the impersonal action of economic laws.
The metaphor of base and superstructure and the socio-economic formation they define has proven to be a fruitful analytical tool. But it also gave rise to a huge number of discussions both within Marxism and outside it. One of the issues is the definition of industrial relations. Since their core is relations of ownership of the means of production, they must inevitably include legal definitions, but this model defines them as superstructural. Because of this, the analytical separation of the basis and superstructure seems difficult.
An important point of debate around the model of basis and superstructure was the point of view that the basis supposedly rigidly determines the superstructure. A number of critics argue that this model entails economic determinism. However, it should be borne in mind that K. Marx and F. Engels themselves never adhered to such a doctrine. Firstly, they understood that many elements of the superstructure can be relatively autonomous from the base and have their own laws of development. Secondly, they argued that the superstructure not only interacts with the base, but also quite actively influences it.
So, the historical period of development of a particular society, during which a given mode of production dominates, is called a socio-economic formation. The introduction of this concept into the sociological analysis of the periodization of societies has a number of advantages.
♦ The formational approach allows one to distinguish one period of social development from another according to fairly clear criteria.
♦ Using the formational approach, one can find common essential features in the life of different societies (countries and peoples) that are at the same stage of development even in different historical periods, and, on the contrary, find explanations for the differences in the development of two societies coexisting in the same period , but with different levels of development due to differences in production methods.
♦ The formational approach allows us to consider society as a single social organism, that is, to analyze all social phenomena based on the method of production in organic unity and interaction.
♦ The formational approach makes it possible to reduce the aspirations and actions of individuals to the actions of large masses of people.
Based on the formational approach, all human history is divided into five socio-economic formations. However, before moving on to their direct consideration, one should pay attention to the system-forming features that determine the parameters of each of the formations.
The first of these relates to the structure of labor as Marx defines it in his Capital. According to the labor theory of value, the goal of any economic system is to create use values, that is, useful things. However, in many economies (especially capitalist ones) people produce things not so much for their own use, but for exchange for other goods. All goods are produced by labor, and ultimately it is the labor time spent on their production that determines the value of exchange.
An employee’s working time can be divided into two periods. During the first, he produces goods whose value is equal to the cost of his existence - this is necessary labor. “The second period of labor - the one during which the worker works beyond the limits of necessary labor - although it costs him labor, the expenditure of labor power, it does not create any value for the worker. It forms surplus value.” Suppose the working day is ten hours. During part of it - say, eight hours - the worker will produce goods whose value is equal to the cost of his existence (subsistence). During the remaining two hours, the worker will create surplus value, which is appropriated by the owner of the means of production. And this is the second system-forming feature of a socio-economic formation.
The employee himself may be the owner, but the more developed the society, the less likely this is; in most socio-economic formations known to us, the means of production are owned not by the one who directly works with the help of them, but by someone else - a slave owner, a feudal lord, a capitalist. It should be noted that it is surplus value that is the basis, firstly, of private property, and secondly, of market relations.
Thus, we can identify the system-forming features of socio-economic formations that interest us.
The first of them is the relationship between necessary and surplus labor, which is most typical for a given formation. This ratio depends decisively on the level of development of the productive forces, and above all on technological factors. The lower the level of development of the productive forces, the greater the share of necessary labor in the total volume of any product produced; and vice versa - as productive forces improve, the share of surplus product steadily increases.
The second system-forming feature is the nature of ownership of the means of production that dominates in a given society. Now, based on these criteria, we will try to briefly review all five formations.
Primitive communal system (or primitive society). In this socio-economic formation, the method of production is characterized by an extremely low level of development of the productive forces. All labor is necessary; surplus labor is zero. Roughly speaking, this means that everything produced (more precisely, mined) is consumed without a trace, no surplus is formed, which means there is no possibility of either making savings or performing exchange transactions. Therefore, the primitive communal formation is characterized by practically elementary production relations based on social, or rather communal, ownership of the means of production. Private property simply cannot arise here due to the almost complete absence of surplus product: everything that is produced (more precisely, mined) is consumed without a trace, and any attempt to take away or appropriate something obtained by the hands of others will simply lead to the death of the one who has it taken away.
For the same reasons, there is no commodity production here (there is nothing to put up for exchange). It is clear that such a base corresponds to an extremely underdeveloped superstructure; People simply cannot appear who could afford to professionally engage in management, science, religious rites, etc.
A rather important point is the fate of prisoners who are captured during clashes between warring tribes: they are either killed, eaten, or accepted into the tribe. Forcing them to work forcibly does not make any sense: they will use everything they produce without reserve.
Slavery (slave-owning formation). Only the development of productive forces to such a level that causes the appearance of a surplus product, even in an insignificant volume, radically changes the fate of the above-mentioned captives. Now it becomes profitable to turn them into slaves, since the entire surplus of products produced by their labor comes at the undivided disposal of the owner. And the greater the number of slaves the owner has, the greater the amount of material wealth concentrated in his hands. In addition, the emergence of the same surplus product creates the material prerequisites for the emergence of the state, as well as, for a certain part of the population, professional pursuits in religious activity, science and art. That is, a superstructure as such arises.
Therefore, slavery as a social institution is defined as a form of property that gives one person the right to own another person. Thus, the main object of property here is people, acting not only as a personal, but also as a material element of the productive forces. In other words, like any other means of production, a slave is a thing with which its owner is free to do whatever he wants - buy, sell, exchange, donate, throw away as unnecessary, etc.
Slave labor existed in a variety of social settings, from the ancient world to the colonies of the West Indies and the plantations of the southern states of North America. Surplus labor here is no longer equal to zero: the slave produces products in a volume slightly exceeding the cost of his own food. At the same time, from the point of view of production efficiency, a number of problems always arise when using slave labor.
1. The barracks slave system is not always able to reproduce itself, and slaves must be obtained either by purchase in the slave trading markets or by conquest; Therefore, slave systems often tended to suffer from severe labor shortages.
2. Slaves require significant "force" supervision due to the threat of their revolts.
3. It is difficult to force slaves to perform labor tasks that require qualifications without additional incentives. The presence of these problems suggests that slavery cannot provide an adequate basis for continued economic growth. As for the superstructure, its characteristic feature is the almost complete exclusion of slaves from all forms of political, ideological and many other forms of spiritual life, since the slave is considered as one of the varieties of working cattle or a “talking instrument.”
Feudalism (feudal formation). American researchers J. Prower and S. Eisenstadt list five characteristics common to the most developed feudal societies:
1) lord-vassal relationship;
2) a personalized form of government, which is effective at the local rather than at the national level, and which has a relatively low level of division of functions;
3) land ownership, based on the grant of feudal estates (fiefs) in exchange for service, primarily military;
4) the existence of private armies;
5) certain rights of landowners in relation to serfs.
These features characterize an economic and political system that was most often decentralized (or weakly centralized) and dependent on a hierarchical system of personal connections within the nobility, despite the formal principle of a single line of authoritarianism going back to the king. This ensured collective defense and maintenance of order. The economic basis was a local organization of production, with the dependent peasantry providing the surplus product that the landowners needed to fulfill their political functions.
The main object of property in the feudal socio-economic formation is land. Therefore, the class struggle between landlords and peasants focuses primarily on the size of production units assigned to tenants, the terms of the lease, and control over the basic means of production such as pastures, drainage systems, and mills. Therefore, modern Marxist approaches argue that because the tenant peasant has a certain degree of control over production (for example, the possession of customary rights), "non-economic measures" are required to ensure landowners' control over the peasantry and the products of their labor. These measures represent basic forms of political and economic domination. It should be noted that, unlike capitalism, where workers are deprived of any control over the means of production, feudalism allows serfs to fairly effectively own some of these means, in return ensuring the appropriation of surplus labor in the form of rent.
Capitalism (capitalist formation). This type of economic organization in its ideal form can be very briefly defined by the presence of the following features:
1) private ownership and control over the economic instrument of production, i.e. capital;
2) driving economic activity to generate profit;
3) the market structure that regulates this activity;
4) appropriation of profit by capital owners (subject to state taxation);
5) ensuring the labor process by workers who act as free agents of production.
Historically, capitalism developed and grew to a dominant position in economic life simultaneously with the development of industrialization. However, some of its features can be found in the commercial sector of the pre-industrial European economy - and throughout the medieval period. We will not dwell here in detail on the characteristics of this socio-economic formation, since in modern sociology the view of capitalist society as identical to industrial society is largely widespread. We will move a more detailed consideration of it (as well as the question of the legitimacy of such an identification) into one of the subsequent chapters.
The most important characteristic of the capitalist mode of production: the development of productive forces reaches such a quantitative and qualitative level that makes it possible to increase the share of surplus labor to a size exceeding the share of necessary labor (here it is expressed in the form of wages). According to some data, in a modern high-tech company, the average employee works for himself (that is, produces a product worth his salary) for fifteen minutes out of an eight-hour working day. This indicates an approach to a situation where the entire product becomes surplus, turning the share of necessary labor into zero. Thus, the logic of the labor theory of value brings the trend of general historical development close to the idea of communism.
This logic is as follows. The capitalist formation, having deployed mass production, gigantically increases the total volume of products produced and at the same time ensures an increase in the share of the surplus product, which at first becomes comparable to the share of the necessary product, and then begins to quickly exceed it. Therefore, before moving on to considering the concept of the fifth socio-economic formation, let us dwell on the general trend of changes in the ratio of these shares during the transition from one formation to another. Graphically, this trend is conventionally presented in the diagram (Fig. 18).
This process begins, as we remember, with the fact that in a primitive community all the product produced is necessary; there is simply no surplus. The transition to slavery means the emergence of a certain share of surplus product and at the same time an increase in the total volume of products produced in society. The trend continues with each subsequent transition, and modern capitalism (if it can still be called capitalism in the strict sense of the word), as we saw in the previous chapter, reaches a ratio of shares of necessary and surplus product of 1 to 30. If we extrapolate this trend into the future , then the conclusion is inevitable about the complete disappearance of the necessary product - the entire product will be surplus, just as in the primitive community the entire product was necessary. This is the main quality of the hypothetical fifth formation. We are already accustomed to calling it communist, but not everyone understands its characteristic features, which logically follow from the extrapolation described above. What does the disappearance of the required share of the product mean in accordance with the provisions of the labor theory of value?
It finds its expression in the following systemic qualities of the new formation.
1. Production ceases to be of a commodity nature, it becomes directly social.
2. This leads to the disappearance of private property, which also becomes public (and not just communal, as in the primitive formation).
3. If we consider that the necessary share of the product under capitalism was expressed in wages, then this too disappears. Consumption in this formation is organized in such a way that any member of society receives from public reserves everything he needs for a full life. In other words, the connection between the measure of labor and the measure of consumption disappears.
Rice. 18. Trends in changes in the ratio of necessary and surplus product
Communism (communist formation). Being more a doctrine than a practice, the concept of a communist formation refers to such future societies in which there will be no:
1) private property;
2) social classes;
3) forced (“enslaving people”) division of labor;
4) commodity-money relations.
The characteristics of the fifth formation directly follow from the properties listed above. K. Marx argued that communist societies would be formed gradually - after the revolutionary transformation of capitalist societies. He also noted that these four basic properties of the fifth formation in a certain (albeit very primitive) form are also characteristic of primitive tribal societies - a condition that he considered primitive communism. The logical construction of “genuine” communism, as we have already said, is derived by Marx and his followers as a direct extrapolation from the trends of the previous progressive development of socio-economic formations. It is no coincidence that the beginning of the creation of the communist system is considered as the end of the prehistory of human society and the beginning of its true history.
There are serious doubts that these ideas have been put into practice in modern societies. Most former "communist" countries maintained some degree of private property, a widely enforced division of labor, and a class system based on bureaucratic privilege. The actual development of societies that called themselves communist gave rise to discussions among the theorists of communism, some of them are of the opinion that a certain share of private property and a certain level of division of labor seem inevitable under communism.
So, what is the progressive essence of this historical process of consistent change of socio-economic formations?
The first criterion of progress, as noted by the classics of Marxism, is a consistent increase in the degree of freedom1 of living labor during the transition from one formation to another. In fact, if we pay attention to the main object of private property, we will see that under slavery it is people, under feudalism it is land, under capitalism it is capital (appearing in the most diverse forms). A serf peasant is actually freer than any slave. A worker is generally a legally free person, and without such freedom the development of capitalism is generally impossible.
The second criterion of progress in the transition from one formation to another is, as we have seen, a consistent (and significant) increase in the share of surplus labor in the total volume of social labor.
Despite the presence of a number of shortcomings of the formational approach (many of which stem, rather, from fanatical dogmatization, the absolutization of some provisions of Marxism by its most orthodox and ideological supporters), it can turn out to be quite fruitful in analyzing the periodization of the historical development of human society, in which we have yet to Once again make sure throughout the further presentation.
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