(see also, means of production)
Classes are made of complexes or networks of productive and property relations. The raw material of class analysis and its most basic building block is the productive or property relation itself. Each social class in a given mode of production is composed of clusters of productive relations, ranging from their relations to the means of production (the tools, land, and so on, with which all the crafts of human society are made) to the juridically enforced property relation of race.
To put it simply: modern English lacks the descriptive rigor to divide the actually existing economics from the ideologically-produced social elements produced by those economics. We conflate, in our everyday speech, these things together all the time. Is gender the ordered division of labor or is it the social expression of that division? Here we will take great care to separate out the actually-existing economic-labor elements of each productive relation from the ideological elements.
The major underlying productive relations that we will consider are:
- gender,
- age,
- “race” and nation,
- judicial slavery, and
Other relations of production common to this mode of production are:
- money, and
