Describe the impact of capitalist mode of production on society. (Answer in 350 words)

- Describe the impact of capitalist mode of production on society. (Answer in 350 words)
Introduction
For Marx a mode of production is not one institution among others but the hinge on which the rest of a society turns, and capitalism turns it further than any predecessor.

Body

1. What defines this mode of production: Production is for exchange rather than use; the means of production are privately owned; the direct producer, separated from them, has only labour power to sell; and the surplus takes the form of surplus value appropriated in production. Competition compels accumulation, so the mode cannot stand still.
2. Its effects on work and classes: The older gradations of estate and guild are simplified towards two camps, capital and wage labour, whose interests are structurally opposed. Work is divided and subdivided; Braverman's Labor and Monopoly Capital traced the separation of conception from execution and the deskilling that follows from it. Alienation, set out in the 1844 Manuscripts, follows from the arrangement rather than from bad employers: the worker is estranged from the product, from the act of working, from his species-being and from other men. A reserve army of the unemployed disciplines those in work, and in India the same logic now runs through contract, casual and platform labour rather than through permanent factory employment.
3. Its effects on the wider social order and culture: The cash nexus dissolves relations of personal dependence and replaces them with contract, which is emancipatory and corrosive at once. Commodity fetishism makes relations between people appear as relations between things, so an arrangement made by men looks like a law of nature. Polanyi's The Great Transformation described the disembedding of the market and the treatment of land, labour and money as fictitious commodities. Urbanisation, the nuclear household, mass education and consumption as a source of identity all follow, and the superstructure of law, politics and ideology is fitted to the property form.
4. How far the effects follow from the mode itself: Not all of them. Weber's Protestant Ethic reverses the causal order by deriving the spirit of accumulation from religious ethics. Capitalism has taken Nordic welfare, East Asian developmental and Indian informalised forms, which the mode alone does not predict. In India it grafted itself onto caste rather than dissolving it, as Harriss-White's India Working argues.

Conclusion
Capitalism reorganises a society more thoroughly than any earlier mode, but what the reorganisation looks like is settled by the institutions it meets.