What is the economic sphere of society?

2024 Author: Henry Conors | [email protected]. Last modified: 2024-02-12 02:55

Any society, being an integral dynamic system, must be united around a number of generally accepted common values - political aspirations, historical memory, and so on.

Main areas of life of social organisms

As a rule, there are four such: the economic sphere of society, spiritual, political and social. We will dwell on the first one in more detail.

Economic sphere of society

Let's refer to the opinion of the majority of historical and social schools. According to them, it is the economic sphere of society that is the most important in this list. After all, it is the development of productive forces that largely determines other relations among people: hierarchy, political structure, and so on. The economic sphere of society is a set of social relations in the production sphere, exchange, distribution and final consumption of material resources and goods. Forms of organization in any kind of economic activity are economic systems. The latter may differ depending on the types of property, means of production, ways of coordinating thiseconomic activity, the level of technical development or the nature of economic relations.

The main stages of the sphere

And since the basis for economic and economic relations, as well as the main factor that determines their specifics, is production and distribution

material goods, then the following main stages are distinguished in this process.

• Production is the process of creating specific material goods. The basis for production is human labor, as well as the degree of technical development and skill of people at each particular historical stage.
• Distribution is the next step, since each good produced must be divided among all members of society. Both direct producers and the state are involved in this process.
• Exchange is the process of converting money into goods and goods into money. In essence, exchange and commodity-money relations are a means of regulating the saturation and provision of material benefits to all participants in economic relations.
• And, in fact, the final stage of the life of a product, when it is used for its intended purpose, satisfying the material needs of people.

Thus, this area is directly related to the most basic human needs, much more fundamental than culture or the state. The economic sphere of society is characterized by threecritical questions:

1. What needs to be produced?

2. How to produce it?

3. Who to produce it for?

Depending on the way of solving these issues, in fact, raising the problem of the most efficient use of limited resources, society takes on one form or another: feudal, commodity-capitalist, primitive, or maybe slave-owning. Thus, the economic sphere of a society is a test that determines its form and degree of development.