Characteristics of the five socio-economic formations. Socio-economic formation The totality of production relations is the basis of the formation 5 letters

Socio-economic formation- the central concept of the Marxist theory of society or historical materialism: "... a society that is at a certain stage of historical development, a society with a peculiar distinctive character." Through the concept of O.E.F. ideas about society as a certain system were fixed and at the same time the main periods of its historical development were singled out.

It was believed that any social phenomenon could only be correctly understood in relation to the particular O.E.F. of which it was an element or product. The very term "formation" was borrowed by Marx from geology.

Completed theory O.E.F. Marx did not formulate, however, if we summarize his various statements, we can conclude that Marx singled out three eras or formations of world history according to the criterion of dominant production relations (forms of ownership): 1) primary formation (archaic pre-class societies); 2) secondary, or "economic" social formation based on private property and commodity exchange and including Asiatic, ancient, feudal and capitalist modes of production; 3) communist formation.

Marx paid the main attention to the "economic" formation, and within its framework - to the bourgeois system. At the same time, social relations were reduced to economic (“basis”), and world history was viewed as a movement through social revolutions to a pre-established phase - communism.

The term O.E.F. introduced by Plekhanov and Lenin. Lenin, on the whole, following the logic of Marx's concept, greatly simplified and narrowed it, identifying O.E.F. with the mode of production and reducing it to a system of production relations. Canonization of the concept of O.E.F. in the form of the so-called "five-member" was carried out by Stalin in " short course history of the CPSU (b)". Representatives of historical materialism believed that the concept of O.E.F. allows you to notice the repetition in history and thereby give its strictly scientific analysis. With the advent of communism, the law of changing formations ceases to operate.

As a result of the transformation of Marx's hypothesis into an infallible dogma, formational reductionism was established in Soviet social science, i.e. the reduction of the entire diversity of the world of people only to formational characteristics, which was expressed in the absolutization of the role of the common in history, the analysis of all social ties along the basis-superstructure line, ignoring the human beginning of history and the free choice of people. In its established form, the concept of O.E.F. together with the idea of ​​linear progress that gave birth to it, already belongs to the history of social thought.

However, overcoming formational dogma does not mean refusing to raise and resolve issues of social typology. Types of society and its nature, depending on the tasks to be solved, can be distinguished according to various criteria, including socio-economic ones.

At the same time, it is important to remember the high degree of abstractness of such theoretical constructions, their schematic nature, the inadmissibility of their ontologization, direct identification with reality, as well as their use for building social forecasts, developing specific political tactics. If this is not taken into account, then the result, as experience shows, is social deformations and catastrophes.

Types of socio-economic formations:

1. Primitive communal system (primitive communism) . Level economic development extremely low, the tools used are primitive, so there is no possibility of producing a surplus product. There is no class division. The means of production are in public ownership. Labor is universal, property is only collective.

2. Asian way of production (other names - political society, state-communal system). At the later stages of the existence of primitive society, the level of production made it possible to create a surplus product. Communities united into large formations with centralized control.

Of these, a class of people gradually emerged, occupied exclusively with management. This class gradually isolated itself, accumulated privileges and material benefits in its hands, which led to the emergence of private property, property inequality and led to the transition to slavery. The administrative apparatus acquired an increasingly complex character, gradually transforming into a state.

The existence of the Asian mode of production as a separate formation is not universally recognized and has been a topic of discussion throughout the history of history; in the works of Marx and Engels, he is also not mentioned everywhere.

3.Slavery . There is private ownership of the means of production. A separate class of slaves is engaged in direct labor - people deprived of their liberty, owned by slave owners and considered as "talking tools". Slaves work but do not own the means of production. Slave owners organize production and appropriate the results of the labor of slaves.

4.Feudalism . Classes of feudal lords - owners of land - and dependent peasants, who are personally dependent on feudal lords, stand out in society. Production (mainly agricultural) is carried out by the labor of dependent peasants exploited by feudal lords. Feudal society is characterized by a monarchical type of government and a social class structure.

5. Capitalism . There is a general right of private ownership of the means of production. Classes of capitalists stand out - the owners of the means of production - and workers (proletarians) who do not own the means of production and work for the capitalists for hire. The capitalists organize production and appropriate the surplus produced by the workers. A capitalist society can have various forms of government, but the most typical for it are various variations of democracy, when power belongs to elected representatives of society (parliament, president).

The main mechanism that encourages work is economic coercion - the worker does not have the opportunity to provide for his life in any other way than by receiving wages for the work being done.

6. Communism . The theoretical (never existed in practice) structure of society, which should replace capitalism. Under communism, all means of production are in public ownership, private ownership of the means of production is completely eliminated. Labor is universal, there is no class division. It is assumed that a person works consciously, striving to bring the greatest benefit to society and not needing external incentives, such as economic coercion.

At the same time, society provides any available benefits to each person. Thus, the principle “To each according to his ability, to each according to his needs!” is realized. Commodity-money relations are abolished. The ideology of communism encourages collectivism and presupposes the voluntary recognition by each member of society of the priority of public interests over personal ones. Power is exercised by the whole society as a whole, on the basis of self-government.

As a socio-economic formation, transitional from capitalism to communism, is considered socialism, in which the socialization of the means of production takes place, but commodity-money relations, economic coercion to work and a number of other features characteristic of a capitalist society are preserved. Under socialism, the principle is implemented: "From each according to his ability, to each according to his work."

Development of Karl Marx's views on historical formations

Marx himself, in his later writings, considered three new "modes of production": "Asiatic", "Ancient" and "Germanic". However, this development of Marx's views was later ignored in the USSR, where only one orthodox version of historical materialism was officially recognized, according to which "five socio-economic formations are known to history: primitive communal, slave-owning, feudal, capitalist and communist."

To this it must be added that in the preface to one of his main early works on this topic: "On the Critique of Political Economy", Marx mentioned the "ancient" (as well as "Asiatic") mode of production, while in other works he (as well as Engels) wrote about the existence in antiquity of a "slave-owning mode of production."

The historian of antiquity M. Finley pointed to this fact as one of the evidence of the poor study by Marx and Engels of the issues of the functioning of ancient and other ancient societies. Another example: Marx himself discovered that the community appeared among the Germans only in the 1st century, and by the end of the 4th century it had completely disappeared from them, but despite this he continued to assert that the community everywhere in Europe had been preserved from primitive times.

Karl Marx (1818-1883), Germany

1) Formation theory of social development of Karl Marx

Important Terms Keywords: mode of production, productive forces, relations of production, basis and superstructure, social revolution, socio-economic formation, 5 "steps" of social development

Main labor: "Capital"

One of the first in the history of sociology, Marx develops a detailed idea of ​​society as a system.

Basis society is a mode of production wealth(he is economic). Consists of productive forces and industrial relations. Productive forces are all resources and means that ensure the production process, natural and human, the level of science, technology, industry. The relations of production are forms of ownership of the means of production.

Production relations (forms of ownership: public/private) correspond to a certain stage in the development of the productive forces (mode of production).

rises above the base superstructure: legal, political, spiritual.

The mode of production determines social, political, spiritual life. It is not the consciousness of people that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being determines their consciousness.

At a certain stage of development, the productive forces come into conflict with the existing production relations. With the change of the economic basis, there is a revolution in the superstructure.

Marx developed the doctrine of socio-economic formations as stages of social development. (term formation

borrowed by Marx from geology and means a complex of geological rocks closely related to each other in vertical - age and horizontal spatial terms).

Socio-economic formation- this is a concrete historical type of society with its inherent production method, social structure, political system and spiritual life.

Marx identified 5 formations:

1. primitive communal,
2. slaveholding,
3. feudal
4. capitalist
5. communist (socialism, communism).

Marx is a supporter of the revolution; founder of conflict theory. According to Marx, a social revolution is a transition from one, less progressive social formation to another, more progressive, a deep qualitative transformation of social relations, it is a rapid, abrupt, conflict and total shift in social relations.

Theory of classes and class struggle :

Marx divides society into classes and presents social development as a result of the interaction and struggle of classes.

Classes, according to Marx, are social groups, which are in relation to each other in an unequal position and fighting among themselves. They are unequal in relation to the means of production, way of life, level of education, etc.

There are no classes in primitive societies and under communism. There is collective ownership of the means of production. Classes exist in the so-called antagonistic (opposition) formations: slave-owning (slave-owners and slaves), feudal (feudal lords and peasants), capitalist (capitalists and workers).

To the begining.

Dictionaries define socio-economic formation as a historically defined type of society based on a certain mode of production. The method of production is one of central concepts in Marxist sociology, characterizing a certain level of development of the entire complex of social relations. Recall that K. Marx developed his main idea of ​​the natural-historical development of society on the basis of singling out various areas public life economic sphere and attaching special importance to it - as the main and determining all the others, and of all types of social relations, he paid priority attention to relations of production- those in which people enter about the production of material goods.

The logic here is quite simple and convincing: the main and determining factor in the life of any society is the acquisition of means of subsistence, without which no other relations between people simply can develop - neither spiritual, nor ethical, nor political, etc. - because without these means will not be and the people themselves. And in order to obtain means of subsistence (to produce them), people must unite, cooperate, enter into certain relationship, which are called production.

Recall once again the structure of Marx's analytical scheme (see Figure 2.3 in the second chapter). productive forces, which form the core of the economic sphere - this is a generalized name for the connection of people with a set material resources in work: raw materials, tools, machinery, tools, buildings and structures used in the production of goods ( real elements or means of production) this aggregate of material elements constitutes the means of production. Home integral part productive forces are, of course, the people themselves ( personality element) with their knowledge, skills and abilities, which allow them with the help of material elements from the objects of the environment natural world produce items designed directly to meet human needs (one's own or others). The productive forces are the most flexible, mobile, continuously developing part of this unity. This is understandable: the knowledge and skills of people are constantly growing, new discoveries and inventions appear, improving, in turn, the tools of labor. Production relations are more inert, inactive, slow in their change, but they form the shell, the nutrient medium in which the productive forces develop. The inseparable unity of the productive forces and production relations is called production method, since it indicates in what way the personal element of the productive forces is connected with the material, thereby forming a concrete, inherent given level development of society is a way of obtaining material wealth.

On the foundation basis(relations of production) grows superstructure. It is, in essence, the totality of all other relations "remaining minus production", and containing many different institutions, such as the state, family, religion or different kinds ideologies in society. The main specificity of the Marxist position comes from the assertion that the nature of the superstructure is determined by the nature of the basis. As the nature of the basis (the deep nature of production relations) changes, so does the nature of the superstructure. Because, for example, the political structure of a feudal society differs from the political structure of a capitalist state, because the economic life of these two societies is essentially different and requires different methods of state influence on the economy, different legislative systems, ideological convictions, etc.

A historically defined stage in the development of a given society, which is characterized by a specific production method and its corresponding superstructure is called socio-economic formation. The change in the modes of production (and the transition from one socio-economic formation to another) is caused antagonism between obsolete relations of production and productive forces, which are becoming crowded within these old frameworks, and they tear it apart like a grown chick breaks the shell (inside which it developed).

The base-and-superstructure model has breathed life into many teachings, ranging from 18th-century romanticism to the analysis of family structure in modern society. The predominant form these teachings took was class-theoretical character. That is, the relations of production in the base were seen as relations between social classes (say, between workers and capitalists), and hence the assertion that the base determines the superstructure means that the nature of the superstructure is largely determined by the economic interests of the dominant social class. Such an emphasis on classes, as it were, "removed" the question of the impersonal action of economic laws.

The metaphor of base and superstructure and the socio-economic structure they define has proved to be a fruitful analytical tool. But it has also generated a great deal of controversy, both within and outside Marxism. One of the points of the problem is the definition of industrial relations.

Since their core is ownership of the means of production, they must inevitably include legal definitions, and this model defines them as superstructural. Because of this, the analytical separation of the base and the superstructure seems difficult.

An important point of contention around the model of base and superstructure was the point of view that the basis determines superstructure. A number of critics argue that this model entails economic determinism. However, it should be borne in mind that K. Marx and F. Engels themselves never adhered to such a doctrine. First, they understood that the elements of the superstructure could be relatively autonomous from the basis and have their own laws of development. Secondly, they argued that the superstructure interacts with the base and quite actively influences it.

So, the historical period of development of a particular society, during which this method production, and called socio-economic formation. The introduction of this concept into the sociological analysis of the periodization of societies has a number of advantages. (1) It makes it possible to distinguish one period of the development of society from another according to fairly clear criteria. (2) With its help, one can find common essential features in the life of various societies (countries and peoples) that are at the same stage of development even in different historical periods, and, on the contrary, find explanations for the differences in the development of two societies coexisting in the same period, but with different levels development due to differences in production methods. (3) The formational approach allows us to approach society as a single social organism, i.e. consider all social phenomena (on the basis of the mode of production) in organic unity and interaction. (4) It makes it possible to reduce the aspirations and actions of individuals to the actions of large masses of people.

Based on the formational approach, the entire human history is divided into five socio-economic formations. However, before proceeding to their direct consideration, a few more remarks should be made about the system-forming features that determine the parameters of each of the formations.

The first of these refers to labor structure, as Marx defines it in his Capital. According to the labor theory of value, the goal of any economic system is the creation of use values, that is, useful things. However, in many economies (especially capitalist ones), people do not produce things directly for their own use, but in exchange for other goods. All commodities are produced with the help of labor, and, ultimately, it is labor time, spent on their production, determines the value of the exchange.

The working time of an employee can be divided into two periods. During the first, he produces commodities whose value is equal to the value of his existence, this necessary work. "The second period of labor - that during which the worker works already beyond the limits of necessary labor - although it costs him labor, the expenditure of labor power, however, does not form any value for the worker. It forms surplus value." Suppose the working day is ten hours. During part of it - say eight hours - the worker will produce goods whose value is equal to the cost of his existence (subsistence). During the remaining two hours, the worker will create surplus value, which is appropriated owner of the means of production. This owner may be the worker himself, but the more developed the society, the less likely it is; in most socio-economic formations known to us, the means of production are owned not by the one who directly works with their help, but by someone else - a slave owner, feudal lord, capitalist. It should be noted that it is surplus value that is the basis, firstly, of private property, and secondly, of market relations.

Thus, we can single out the system-forming features of socio-economic formations that are of interest to us. The first one is relation between necessary and surplus labor, the most typical for this formation. This ratio depends decisively on the level of development of the productive forces, and above all on technological factors. The lower the level of development of productive forces, the more specific gravity the necessary labor in the total volume of any product produced; and vice versa - as the productive forces improve, the share of the surplus product steadily increases. The second system-forming feature is ownership of the means of production dominant in this society. Now, based on these criteria, we will try to briefly review all five formations.

Primitive communal system(or primitive societies). Here the mode of production is characterized by an extremely low level of development of the productive forces. All labor is necessary; surplus labor is zero. Roughly speaking, this means that everything that is produced is consumed without a trace, without forming any surplus, and therefore without giving the opportunity either to make accumulations or to carry out exchange transactions. Therefore, the primitive communal formation is characterized by practically elementary production relations based on social (more precisely) community) ownership of the means of production - private property simply cannot arise here due to the almost complete absence of a surplus product: everything that is produced (more precisely mined) is consumed without a trace, and any attempt to take away, appropriate something obtained by the hands of others will simply lead to death the one from whom it is taken. For the same reasons, there is no commodity production (nothing to put up for exchange). It is clear that an extremely underdeveloped superstructure corresponds to such a basis; there simply cannot be people who could afford to professionally engage in administration, science, religious rites, and so on.

Enough important point- the fate of the captives who are captured during the skirmishes of the warring tribes: they are either simply killed, or turned into food, or accepted into the tribe. It makes no sense to force them to work: they will use everything they produce without a trace.

Slavery. Only the development of productive forces to such a level that causes the appearance of a surplus product, even in an insignificant amount, radically changes the fate of the aforementioned captives. Now it is profitable to turn them into slaves, since the entire surplus of products produced by their labor goes to the undivided disposal of the owner. And the more slaves the owner possesses, the greater the amount of material wealth is concentrated in his hands. In addition, the appearance of the same surplus product creates the material prerequisites for the emergence of the state, as well as - for a certain part of the population - professional religious activities, science and art. That is, there is a superstructure as such.

Therefore, slavery as a social institution is defined as a form of property that gives one person the right to own another person. Thus, the main object of property here is people who act not only as personal, but also as material element of the productive forces. In other words, like any other means of production, a slave is a thing with which its owner is free to do anything - buy, sell, exchange, donate, throw away, etc. Slave labor existed under various social conditions- from the Ancient World to the colonies of the West Indies and the plantations of the southern states of North America. Surplus labor here is no longer equal to zero: the slave produces products in an amount slightly exceeding the cost of his own subsistence. At the same time, from the point of view of production efficiency, the use of slave labor always raises a number of problems. (1) The barracks slave system is not always able to reproduce itself, and slaves must be obtained either by purchase from the slave markets or by conquest; therefore, slave systems often tended to be in dire need of labor resources. (2) Slaves require significant "power" supervision due to the threat of their rebellions. (3) It is difficult to force slaves to perform labor tasks requiring qualifications without additional incentives. The presence of these problems suggests that slavery cannot provide an appropriate basis for a long-term economic growth. As for the superstructure, it feature is the almost complete exclusion of slaves from all forms of political, ideological and many other forms of spiritual life, since the slave is considered as one of the varieties of working cattle or a "talking tool".

Feudalism. American researchers J. Prauer and S.N. Eisenstadt list five characteristics common to the most advanced feudal societies: (1) lord-vassal relations; (2) a personalized form of government that is effective locally rather than nationally, and which has a relatively low level of segregation of functions; (3) landownership based on the grant of feudal estates ( fiefs) in exchange for service, primarily military; (4) the existence of private armies; (5) certain rights of landlords in relation to serfs. Such features characterize an economic and political system that was most often decentralized (or weakly centralized) and dependent on a hierarchical system of personal ties within the nobility, despite the formal principle of a single line of authoritarianism going back to the king. This provided collective defense and maintenance of order. The economic basis was the local organization of production, when the dependent peasantry delivered the surplus product that the landowners needed to fulfill their political functions.

Since land is the main object of property in the feudal socio-economic formation, the class struggle between landowners and peasants focused primarily on the size of production units assigned to tenants, lease conditions, as well as control over the main means of production, such as pastures, drainage systems, mills. Therefore, modern Marxist approaches argue that because the tenant peasant has a certain degree of control over production (for example, the possession of customary law), "non-economic measures" are required to ensure landowner control over the peasantry. These measures are basic forms political and economic dominance. It should be noted that, unlike capitalism, where the workers are deprived of any control over the means of production, feudalism allows the serfs to fairly effectively own some of these means, in return providing themselves with the appropriation of surplus labor in the form of rent.

Capitalism. This type economic organization in its purest form can be very briefly defined by the presence of the following features: (1) private property and control over economic instrument production, i.e. capital; (2) driving economic activity for profit; (3) the market structure that governs this activity; (4) appropriation of profits by owners of capital (subject to taxation by the state); (5) providing the labor process with workers who act as free agents of production. Historically, capitalism has developed and grown to a dominant position in economic life along with the development industrialization. However, some of its features can be found in the commercial sector of the pre-industrial European economy - perhaps throughout the entire medieval period. We will not dwell here in detail on the characteristics of this socio-economic formation, since in modern sociology the view of capitalist society as identical to industrial. Therefore, we will postpone a more detailed consideration of it (as well as the question of the legitimacy of such an identification) until one of the following paragraphs.

The most important characteristic of the capitalist mode of production is that the development of the productive forces reaches such a quantitative and qualitative level that it makes it possible to increase the share of surplus labor to a size exceeding the share of necessary labor (here it is expressed in the form of wages). According to some data, in a modern high-tech firm, the average employee works for himself (i.e., produces a product worth his salary) for fifteen minutes of an eight-hour working day. This indicates an approach to a situation where the entire product becomes surplus, turning the share of necessary labor to zero. Thus the logic of the labor theory of value brings the trend of general historical development close to the idea of ​​communism.

Communism. Being more a doctrine than a practice, this concept refers to such societies in which there are no (1) private property, (2) social classes, (3) forced ("enslaving man") division of labor, (4) commodity-money relationship. K. Marx argued that communist societies would gradually form after the revolutionary overthrow of capitalist societies. He also noted that these three characteristics in a certain (albeit very primitive) form are also characteristic of primitive tribal societies - a condition that he considered as primitive communism. As for "genuine" communism, its logical construction is derived by Marx and his followers as a direct extrapolation from the tendencies of the previous progressive development of socio-economic formations. It is no coincidence that the beginning of the creation of this system is regarded as the end of the prehistory of human society and the beginning of its true history. There are serious doubts that these ideas have been put into practice in contemporary societies. Most of the former "communist" countries retained both a certain amount of private property and a widely enforced division of labor, as well as a class system based on bureaucratic privileges. The actual development of societies that called themselves communist has given rise to discussions among communist theorists, some of whom are of the opinion that some share of private property and a certain level of division of labor seem inevitable under communism.

What is the progressive essence of this historical process of successive change of socio-economic formations? As the classics of Marxism noted, such a criterion of progress is consistent increasing the degree of freedom of living labor when moving from one formation to another. In fact, if we pay attention to the main object of private property, we will see that in slavery it is people, under feudalism - land, under capitalism - capital (acting in the most diverse form). The serf is really freer than any slave. The worker is generally a legally free person, moreover, without such freedom, the development of capitalism is generally impossible. The second manifestation of progressiveness in the transition from one formation to another is, as we have seen, the consistent (and significant) increase in the share of surplus labor in total labor.

Despite the presence of a number of shortcomings of the formational approach (many of which stem, rather, from fanatical dogmatization, the absolutization of some provisions of Marxism by its most orthodox and ideological supporters), it can be quite fruitful in the analysis of the periodization of the historical development of human society, in which we have yet to times to be convinced throughout the further presentation.

For the first time the concept of socio-economic formation was defined by K. Marx. It is based on a materialistic understanding of history. The development of human society is seen as an unchanging and natural process of changing formations. In this case, there are five of them in total. The basis of each of them is a certain emerging in the process of production and during the distribution of material goods, their exchange and consumption, form the economic basis, which in turn determines the legal and political superstructure, the structure of society, life, family, and so on.

The emergence and development of formations is carried out according to special economic laws that are valid until the transition to the next stage of development. One of them is the law of correspondence of production relations to the level and nature of the development of the productive forces. Any formation in its development goes through certain stages. At the latter, a conflict occurs and there is a need to change the old mode of production to a new one and, as a result, one formation, more progressive, replaces the other.

So what is a socio-economic formation?

This is a type of society that has developed historically, the development of which is based on certain way production. Any formation is a certain specific stage of human society.

What socio-economic formations are distinguished by the supporters of this theory of the development of the state and society?

Historically, the first formation is primitive communal. The type of production was determined by the existing relations in the tribal community, the distribution of labor among its members.

As a result of development between peoples, a slave-owning socio-economic formation arises. The scale of communication is expanding. There are such concepts as civilization and barbarism. This period is characterized by many wars, in which war booty and tribute were confiscated as a surplus product, free labor appeared in the form of slaves.

The third stage of development is the emergence of the feudal formation. At this time there were mass resettlement to new lands of peasants, constant wars for subjects and land between feudal lords. Integrity economic units should have been provided military force, and the role of the feudal lord was to maintain their immunity. War became one of the conditions of production.

As the fourth stage in the development of the state and society, supporters single out the capitalist formation. This is the last stage, which is based on the exploitation of people. There is a development of means of production, there are factories and plants. The role is rising international market.

The last socio-economic formation is the communist one, which in its development goes through socialism and communism. At the same time, two types of socialism are distinguished - built in the main and developed.

The theory of socio-economic formations arose in connection with the need scientific justification the steady movement of all countries of the world towards communism, the inevitability of the transition to this formation from capitalism.

Formation theory has a number of shortcomings. Yes, it only takes into account economic factor development of states, which is of great importance, but is not fully decisive. In addition, opponents of the theory point out that in none of the countries does a socio-economic formation exist in its pure form.

The primitive communal formation is characterized by:

1. primitive forms of labor organization (rare use of mechanisms, mainly manual individual labor, occasionally collective labor (hunting, farming);

2. lack of private property - common ownership of the means and results of labor;

3. equality and personal freedom;

4. the absence of coercive public power isolated from society;

5. weak public organization - the absence of states, uniting into tribes on the basis of consanguinity, joint decision-making.

The "Asian mode of production" was widespread in the ancient societies of the East (Egypt, China, Mesopotamia), located in the valleys of large rivers. The Asian mode of production included:

1. irrigation farming as the basis of the economy;

2. lack of private ownership of the main means of production (land, irrigation facilities);

3. state property land and means of production;

4. mass collective labor of free community members under the strict control of the state (bureaucracy);

5. the presence of a strong, centralized, despotic power.

The slave-owning socio-economic formation is fundamentally different from them:

1. private ownership of the means of production arose, including "living", "talking" - slaves;

2. social inequality and social (class) stratification;

3. state and public authority.

4. The feudal socio-economic formation was based on:

5. large land ownership a special class of landowners - feudal lords;

6. labor free, but dependent economically (rarely - politically) from the feudal lords of the peasants;

7. special production relations in free craft centers - cities.

Under the capitalist socio-economic formation:

1. industry begins to play the main role in the economy;

2. the means of production become more complex - mechanization, labor union;

3. industrial means of production belong to the bourgeois class;

4. The main volume of labor is performed by free wage workers, economically dependent on the bourgeoisie.

Communist (socialist) formation (society of the future), according to Marx. Engels, Lenin, will be different:

1. lack of private ownership of the means of production;

2. state (public) ownership of the means of production;

3. labor of workers, peasants, intelligentsia, free from exploitation by private owners;

4. fair and even distribution of the total produced product among all members of society;

5. high level development of productive forces and high organization of labor.

All history is considered as a natural process of changing socio-economic formations. Each new formation matures in the depths of the previous one, denies it, and then is itself denied by an even newer formation. Each formation is a higher type of organization of society.

The classics of Marxism also explain the mechanism of transition from one formation to another:

The productive forces are constantly developing and improving, but the relations of production remain the same. A conflict arises, a contradiction between the new level of productive forces and the outdated production relations. Sooner or later, by violent or peaceful means, changes occur in the economic basis - relations of production, either gradually or by radical breaking and replacing them with new ones, take place in accordance with the new level of productive forces.