[OPE] Question to Marxologists: Mode of production

"Being a deep sea fisherman is going to be a relatively more dangerous than being a schoolteacher, whatever the social relations"?

You got to be joking. These days as a teacher you can be physically attacked by your students, quite apart from picking up diseases, either contagious ones or related to work stress. In many schools these days, you practically have to walk around with a stick.

Farming is always going to be risky, because you can't just philosophize about the concept of "mode production", somebody actually has to get their hands dirty. It's just that the most of the world's farmers lack insurance and lack adequate medical services.

I attach my sophomore diagram of "mode production" (1979) which may be helpful. Jeez, I'm so bright, with this fantastic abstraction ability I should be at least a manager!

BTW by MoP Marx doesn't mean "a structured totality of structured structures" but just "the way of producing" (Produktionsweise) with respect to its technical and social form of organisation. The idea is that capitalist activity adapts and changes both, to fit in with its commercial requirements. Thus, the "specifically capitalist mode of production" features a form of organisation of production which best serves the accumulation of capital, and which is produced and reproduced by capitalist production acccording to the imperatives of cutting costs, increasing profits and increasing sales. Althusser doesn't "think" organisation because organisation involves subjects, and if history is as Althusser says "a process without a subject" there are no subjects in history, only persistent abstract structures which evolve over time. "Class struggle" is just a friction of structures, where the Central Committee in the cockpit of history sometimes pushes the class struggle knob. You guessed it, it's a technocratic fantasy.

Jurriaan

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