Karl Marx, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
The mode of production is not simply a technique for extracting food from the earth or a machine for turning raw material into finished goods. It is the specific, historically determinate form in which human beings express their life — and therefore, in the most literal sense, what they are.1 The point requires precision. What individuals are coincides with what they produce and how they produce it; their nature depends on the material conditions determining their production.2
This is not a claim about tools and techniques in isolation. It is a claim about the whole web of relations — between persons, and between persons and nature — through which a given community reproduces itself. The community itself appears as the first great force of production; particular modes of working, whether stock-breeding or agriculture or manufacture, develop particular productive forces, both objective ones embedded in instruments and organization, and subjective ones appearing as capacities of individuals.3
From this the structural consequence follows directly. The totality of relations of production — not the individual transaction, not the isolated workshop, but the whole organized ensemble — constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation on which a legal and political superstructure arises and to which definite forms of social consciousness correspond.4
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their social existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.5 The historical dimension is equally essential. A given mode of production is not permanent; it corresponds to a definite stage of development of the material productive forces. At a certain stage, those forces come into contradiction with the existing relations of production — with, in legal terms, the property relations within which they had previously functioned.
From being forms of development of the productive forces, those relations turn into their fetters, and then an epoch of social revolution commences.6 No social order is destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed; new relations of production never replace older ones before their material conditions have matured within the framework of the old society.7
And under the specifically capitalist mode of production, something further happens that was not visible in earlier forms. The social forms of developed labour — co-operation, manufacture, the factory organized on the basis of machinery — appear not as achievements of the associated producers but as forms of development of capital, confronting the individual labourers as something extraneous and objective, as functions of the means of labour that are independent of them and control them.8
The mode of production here generates its own mystification: the productive power of social labour appears as the productive power of capital, and the relation of domination is not personal but structural — the domination of materialized labour over living labour, of the labourer's own product over the labourer himself.9 That inversion is what the analysis of the mode of production is designed to make visible.
This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the reproduction of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part.The German Ideology, p. 8
As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions determining their production.The German Ideology, p. 8
The community itself appears as the first great force of production; particular kinds of production conditions (e.g. stock-breeding, agriculture), develop particular modes of production and particular forces of production, subjective, appearing as qualities of individuals, as well as objective [ones].Grundrisse, pp. 418–419
The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness.EARLY WRITINGS, pp. 427–428
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.EARLY WRITINGS, pp. 427–428
At a certain level of their development the material productive forces of society come into contradiction with the already existing relations of production... From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then an epoch of social revolution commences.Preface’ to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, p. 160
No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.EARLY WRITINGS, pp. 427–428
the forms of socially developed labour—co-operation, manufacture (as a form of division of labour), the factory (as a form of social labour organised on machinery as its material basis)—all these appear as forms of the development of capital... all this confronts the individual labourers themselves as something extraneous and objective, as a mere form of existence of the means of labour that are independent of them and control them.Theories of Surplus Value Vol I, pp. 388–389
what distinguishes this form from all previous forms is that the capitalist does not rule over the labourer through any personal qualities he may have, but only in so far as he is 'capital'; his domination is only that of materialised labour over living labour, of the labourer's product over the labourer himself.Theories of Surplus Value Vol I, pp. 388–389