Page 173 - Communication and the Evolution of Society

150 Communication and Evolution of Society

analyze changes in the complexity of a society in dependence on
its mode of production.*°
2. There are, of course, also difficulties in employing this con-
cept. The decisive point of view here is how access to the means of
production is regulated. The state of discussion within historical
materialism today is marked by the acceptance of s7x universal,
developmental-logically consecutive modes of production.** In
primitive societies, labor and distribution were organized by
means of kinship relations. There was no private access to nature
and to the means of production (primitive communal mode of
production). In the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt,
Ancient China, Ancient India, and pre-Columbian America, land
was owned by the state and administered by the priesthood, the
military, and the bureaucracy; this arrangement was superimposed
upon the remains of village communal property (the so-called
Asiatic mode of production). In Greece, Rome, and other Medi-
terranean societies, the private landowner combined the position
of despotic master of slaves and day laborers in the framework
of the household economy with that of a free citizen in the
political community of city or state (ancient mode of production).
In medieval Europe, feudalism was based on large private estates
allotted to individual holders who stood in various relations of
dependence (including serfdom) to the feudal lord; these rela-
tions were defined in terms that were at once political and eco-
nomic (feudal mode of production). Finally, in capitalism, labor
power became a commodity, so that the dependency of the im-
mediate producers on the owners of the means of production was
secured legally through the institution of the labor contract, and
economically through the labor market.
The application of this schema runs into difficulties in anchro-
pological and historical research. These are in part problems of
mixed and transitional forms—there are only a few instances in
which the economic structure of a specific society coincides with
a single mode of production; both intercultural diffusion and
temporal overlay permit complex structures to arise that have to
be dectphered as a combination of several modes of production.
But the more important problems are those posed by the devel-
opmental-logical ordering of the modes of production themselves.