Capitalism as a particular formation of society includes economic relations such as commodity production, markets, capital, labour as well as social, political, legal and cultural relations (Küttler 2008, 238). A formation of society is, according to Marx, a “totality” of “the material conditions of life” (Marx 1859, 262). In society, the material conditions of life is constituted by humans’ social production processes; social and societal production and reproduction processes form the materiality of society (see Fuchs 2020a).
For Marx, (1894, 957), a formation of society is “both a production process of the material conditions of existence for human life and a process […] that produces and reproduces these relations of production themselves”. A formation of society is the totality of relations that humans have “towards nature and one another” (p. 957). Social and societal relations and the conditions of human life are the “results and creation” of the social production processes of humans (p. 957). Human production produces and reproduces societal and social relations and human conditions of life (p. 957).
The originality of Marx’s notion of Gesellschaftsformation is that it is simultaneously both economic and non-economic. Marx analyses the special role of the economy in capitalist society and society in general without reducing the non-economic to the economic whole at the same time ascertaining the trans-economic role of production in all social systems of society so that the economy is in the form of social production sublated in the non-economic spheres, practices and dimensions of society where it takes on emergent qualities.
The concept of the formation of society (Gesellschaftsformation) functions both as a systematic bracket for the analysis of the economy and its effects on all other spheres of life in bourgeois society and as a framework concept for the methodological justification of this procedure in a more general conception of history and society. (Küttler 2001, 591)
Bob Jessop (1997, 2002) takes up Marx’s notion of Vergesellschaftung (societalisation) for the analysis of capitalism. He argues that the “capitalist economy and its dynamic” are “embedded in a wider nexus of social relations and institutions” and that capitalism is “a complex economic and extra-economic social relation” (Jessop 1997, 565). Societalisation has to do with the way of how the economic and the noneconomic are related in society and how social relations are organised. “Societalization refers to the production of ‘society effects’ within a specific ‘timespace envelope’: society effects have two dimensions - social cohesion and system (or institutional) integration” (Jessop 1997, 579, footnote 7).
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Introduction