Revolution Online, December 14, 2008
Glossary:
Forces of production: The technology, raw materials and resources, land, and the people – including their knowledge and skills – through which production is carried out. Take agriculture, for instance. In feudal, or slave, society the forces of production in agriculture would include crude plows, draft animals like oxen or horses, etc. In modern capitalist society, these forces of production include tractors and other farm machinery, chemical fertilizer, computers, genetic engineering, etc. The people who work in agriculture in these different societies would have different forms of knowledge, corresponding to the forces of production.
Relations of production: At the foundation of society is the production, and reproduction, of the necessities of life. To carry out this production, people must enter into certain definite relations with each other. These relations include three spheres. Ownership pertains to who owns the means to produce these necessities. The second sphere is relations between people within the production process – how people involved in the production process interact with each other (who makes decisions and plans, and what is their relation to the people who carry out these plans). The third sphere is distribution – how the actual wealth created through the production process is distributed. Ownership is the most fundamental of these three, but they all interrelate. The totality of the relations of production is often referred to as the economic base of society.
Class: Class is determined by an individual’s relation to production. In capitalist society, those who own the massive means of production and who also control big blocs of financial capital, and who thereby control this as capital, make up the capitalist class. In Marxist terms, the capitalists are also known as the bourgeoisie.
Those who own less means of production, employing fewer people or only themselves, or who occupy a place in the overall production process midway between the capitalists (who control production) and the proletariat, are known as the petty bourgeoisie – or small capitalists. There are many different levels of independence and wealth, and many different types of occupations in the petty bourgeoisie.
That class which owns no means of production, and whose members must find a capitalist to whom they can sell their ability to work, is the proletariat. This exchange of work for wages, in a relation that produces ever more wealth for capital but only enables the proletariat to basically survive and reproduce itself, is the basic relation of capitalism. The proletariat is exploited in this way by the bourgeoisie, and it confronts the very creations of its labor as an alien power that dominates it.
Superstructure: The superstructure refers to the political and cultural institutions of society, and the ideas. For instance, what is the form of state power? How is education carried out? What are the forms of art and culture? And what are the dominant ideas of the society? In class society, one or another class controls the superstructure. This control is concentrated in the state’s monopoly on the “legitimate use of force” – the power of dictatorship.
As Bob Avakian has written, “In a world marked by profound class divisions and social inequality, to talk about ‘democracy’—without talking about the class nature of that democracy and which class it serves—is meaningless, and worse. So long as society is divided into classes, there can be no ‘democracy for all’: one class or another will rule, and it will uphold and promote that kind of democracy which serves its interests and goals. The question is: which class will rule and whether its rule, and its system of democracy, will serve the continuation, or the eventual abolition, of class divisions and the corresponding relations of exploitation, oppression and inequality.”
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