The Early Life of Marx's “Mode of Production”

Abstract

This article reexamines Marx's early conception of history by returning to his 1845–6 manuscripts, long known as The German Ideology. On conventional interpretations of these manuscripts, Marx sought to explain the entire historical process through a theory of the systematic development of productive forces. This article reveals that concern to be an artifact of subsequent editorial practices and argues that a different concern animated the manuscripts for Marx himself—namely to grasp the nature of individual epochs, particularly the present one, which he doubted that a generalized theory of history could help him to do. In “Saint Max,” perhaps the most neglected of these early manuscripts, Marx developed the concept of a “mode of production” into a historical lens, one that could aid the work of social critique by bringing into focus how the present is made and might be made anew.