[2] A "mode of production" (German: Produktionsweise) means simply "the distinctive way of producing", which could be defined in terms of how it is socially organized and what kinds of technologies and tools are used.
Contemporary mainstream (bourgeois) economics, particularly that associated with the right, holds that an "invisible hand",[4] through little more than the freedom of the market, is able to match social production to these needs and desires.
In general, capitalism as an economic system and mode of production can be summarized by the following: Marx argued that capital existed incipiently on a small scale for centuries in the form of merchant, renting and lending activities and occasionally also as small-scale industry with some wage labour (Marx was also well aware that wage labour existed for centuries on a modest scale before the advent of capitalist industry).
That required a whole series of new conditions, namely specific technologies of mass production, the ability to independently and privately own and trade in means of production, a class of workers compelled to sell their labor power for a living, a legal framework promoting commerce, a physical infrastructure making the circulation of goods on a large scale possible, security for private accumulation and so on.
In many Third World countries, many of these conditions do not exist even today even though there is plenty of capital and labour available—the obstacles for the development of capitalist markets are less a technical matter and more a social, cultural and political problem.
In a sense, it is Marx's three-volume work Capital (1867–1894; sometimes known by its German title, Das Kapital), as a whole that provides his "definition" of the capitalist mode of production.
Orthodox Marxist debate after 1917 has often been in Russian, other East European languages, Vietnamese, Korean or Chinese and dissidents seeking to analyze their own country independently were typically silenced in one way or another by the regime, therefore the political debate has been mainly from a Western point of view and based on secondary sources, rather than being based directly on the experiences of people living in "actually existing socialist countries".
From an orthodox Marxist perspective, the former is simple ignorance and or purposeful obfuscation of works such as Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason and a broader literature which does in fact supply such specifications.
Neither historical or dialectical materialism assert or imply a "uni-linear" view of human development, although Marxism does claim a general and indeed accelerating secular trend of advancement, driven in the modern period by capitalism.
Finally, in the wake of the disasters of socialism in the previous century most modern Marxists are at great pains to stipulate that only the independently acting working class can determine the nature of the society it creates for itself so the call for a prescriptive description of exactly what that society would be like and how it is to emerge from the existing class-ridden one, other than by the conscious struggle of the masses, is an unwitting expression of precisely the problem that is supposed to be being addressed (the imposition of social structure by elites).