«»4 SOCIAL SCIENTIST and logical rigour a great deal of what passes for "orthodox" Marxist wisdom That is an interpretation of Marx's method which I quite firmly reject, for h offers the illusory hope that the theoretical (and—n^eo If add ?—praxiological) problems posed by the concept of the mode of production as a specihc combination of the forces and the relations of production can be circumvented by resort to some linear 'law of history'. It is ridiculous to suggest, as the yevtewers do, that I would regard Marx's treatment of the immediate process ^fiproduction.in Capital, volume 1, as an instance of'techno-economic determinism'. Marx's discussion was located within a very carefully defined theoretical problem regarding the critical analysis of capitalist production. He did not pretend that a study of the immediate process of production would enable us to read off as it were the specific characteristics of, say, the capitalist state or bourgeois ideology or proletarian consciousness. Consequently, my plea that we devote greater attention than hitherto towards developing appropriate concepts for analysing the different aspects of the social relations of production is not an argument for substituting a 'one-dimensional study' of power in place of the central emphasis that we now give to the concept of the mode of production. Rather it is an argument against the common tendency to reduce historical explanation in terms of the mode of production to a single dimension of change, that of the forces of production. It is a plea to restore to the concept of the mode of production its potential richness as a basic tool of analysis and to accept the theoretical challenge it poses. It is the central misunderstanding that the concept of the mode of power is intended to replace the concept of the mode of production which leads the reviewers to their subsequent criticisms of my article. For instance, they say that when I describe the 'property connection* I mean 'property in its legal-juridical sense'. But that can hardly be true for I state quite dearly that the analysis of the property connection will concern 'the question of rights or entitlements in society, of the resultant power relationships, of law and politics, of the process oflegitimat'on of power relations, etc.' which certainly describes an area far larger than 'property in its legal-juridical sense'. In fact, one oi the main implications of the mode of power analysis will be our ability to make the distinction between state power and class power and thus to study situation in which the two do not necessarily coincide. The reviewers then go on to announce that'political-juridical structures' are 'part of the superstructure' whereas 'the structure of production relations' is surelv 'internal to the economic infrastructure' and that therefore the analysis of thd former can hardly hav^ any role to play in the stnct analysis of the latter. (Of course, if they mean that an-analysis of'political-juridical structures' cannot be a substitute for the analysis of'the structure of production relations*, then the objection is irrelevant for that is not what I seek to do anyway). They also declare that 'the political and ideological levels' are determined 'in the last instance' by 'the economic level', presumably meaning thereby that the possibilities of the political or the ideological instance conditioning the economic can be treated as problems of a subordinate or