Mode of Life

The sum total of the forms of life activities and of the features of acts of men who live under certain socio-historical conditions guided by certain value ideas and according to certain cultural models in order to satisfy their own needs of life by applying various material and mental resources. Mode of life is actually people’s mode of existence and the mode they satisfy and accomplish their needs, and it is also the basic mode men grasp society and themselves.

Mode of life is a synthetic concept with abundant connotations, and there is a distinction between the wider and the narrower sense. In a wider sense, it refers to all the modes of people’s lives corresponding to a mode of production, which covers all the life activities of people in many fields, at many levels and from many sides, reflecting the typical mode and basic feature of all social life activities, and becoming the comprehensive manifestation of people’s real social life activities. From the perspective of satisfying men’s own needs, a mode of life needs to deal with relations in various aspects, including their relation to nature, to society, to each other, to themselves, etc. It involves not only the sphere of material life, but also the sphere of intellectual life. It covers not only the sphere of economic life, but also various spheres such as social life, political life and cultural life, covering cities and villages, with different age groups, genders and categories as the main subjects, forming contents such as leisure mode of life, consumer mode of life, political mode of life, intercourse mode of life, religious mode of life, family mode of life, woman mode of life, youth mode of life, senior mode of life, rural mode of life and urban mode of life. In a narrower sense, it is limited to the sphere of daily life, or directly refers to people’s clothing, meals, housing, transportation and leisure life, referring to the mode of daily life activities of individuals and their families.

The fundamental structure of the mode of life includes four aspects: the subject of life activities, the conditions of life activities, the content of life activities and the form of life activities. These four aspects form an interconnected complex structure. The subject of life activities is man, including individuals, groups and mankind. Accordingly, people’s mode of life includes individual mode of life as well as group mode of life and social mode of life. The subject of life activities has a central position in the structure of a mode of life. Man is the subject of society and practice, and has autonomy, agency and creativity. Among them, man’s value outlook plays an important regulatory part in people’s acts of life; it determines the direction of one’s choice of mode of life. Thus, under the same conditions of life, different subjects of life activities can develop completely different modes of life. The content of life activities is diverse and rich, including labor, material consumption, intercourse, politics, mental and cultural entertainment, family marriage and everyday life. The diversity of the content of activities is determined by the diversity of life needs. In terms of concrete aspects of content, they are distinct but intersect and permeate each other. Therefore, the content of life activities cannot be understood as a single activity. The form of life activity, then, is the outward appearance of life activities, which is manifested in certain states, models, styles and characteristics of life activity. It is formed as a result of the interaction between the conditions of life activities in a certain society and the different subjects of life activities.

The formation of a mode of life is conditioned by a certain environment and certain conditions. The environment includes natural and social environment. The influence of natural environment on the mode of life is always interwoven with certain socio-historical conditions. The social environment includes the level of development of the productive forces of society, the nature of the relations of production and the state of superstructure, and other elements. Marx placed great emphasis on the revolutionary part played by the productive forces and the mode of production in the emergence and revolution of the mode of life. On the one hand, Marx emphasized the dialectical relation between life and production. He held that the needs of human social life are the premise for material and intellectual production, i.e., all production exists to satisfy the various needs of human life, while the material production is the fundamental way and the basic means to satisfy the needs of human existence and development, and is the basis and driving force for the forward progress of human social life. In short, life is the purpose of production, and production is the realization of life. On the other hand, Marx emphasized the coincidence of modes of production and modes of life and the determining nature of the mode of production over the mode of life. Marx held that the mode of life in a certain historical epoch is always connected with the mode of production and the social formation of a certain society. The mode of production of a certain society and epoch determines people’s mode of life, and along with the development of productive forces, the mode of life is bound to change accordingly. In short, as people produce they live. Marx and Engels pointed out that the way in which men produce their means of subsistence depends, in the first place, on the nature of the actual means of subsistence they find in existence and have to reproduce. This mode of production must not be considered simply as being the production of the physical existence of the individuals. Rather it is a definite form of activity of these individuals, a definite form of expressing their life, a definite mode of life on their part. As individuals express their life, so they are. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production, both with what they produce and with how they produce. The nature of individuals thus depends on the material conditions that determine their production. In other words, along with each mode of production of society, there is a mode of life of society that corresponds to it, and the evolutionary process of human social production is inevitably accompanied by the evolutionary process of modes of life of human society. With the constant development of the level of productive forces and the constant renewal of the mode of production, people’s modes of life will have a continuous process of change and development. Yet, the actual motive for the revolutions in the mode of life is human social practice. Thus, the mode of production is the basis of all modes of activity of human society, and it determines the nature of the mode of life of human society. As Marx pointed out, the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political and intellectual life. To this end, Marx, in his analysis of capitalist society, took the mechanical invention as an example and pointed out that the mechanical invention brought about a revulsion in the mode of production and hence in the relations of production, hence the social relations and eventually in the habits of the operatives. Due to the differences in natural environment, social and political system, ideology and morality, science and culture, historical traditions, customs and habits, religious faith and value ideas, the mode of life of society of people in different historical epochs will certainly be poles apart, and even at different stages of development in the same historical epoch, the degree of realization of their modes of life will vary. Moreover, people in the same epoch will have different modes of behavior and modes of life for each individual due to their concrete working conditions, income and consumption levels, living environment and educational situation, etc. A certain mode of life reflects the degree of political, economic, and cultural development of society, and therefore has certain nature and features of society, and it can be used to compare different social formations in order to reveal their features and differences. There is an essential difference between socialist and capitalist mode of life. In contemporary times, the former tends to vigor, the latter to decay. Marx profoundly revealed the differences in the mode of life of people of different classes and strata, of different regions and under different conditions of existence, and also described the features of the ideal mode of life of the future society. Lenin also pointed out that each social stratum has its own mode of life, its own habits and its own penchants. Moreover, human mode of life has its own unique laws of development. Although it is subject to the economic, political and cultural factors of a certain society, it is often condensed in people’s acts of daily life through internal inheritance. When certain socio-historical conditions do not change qualitatively, the mode of life of the people in that society can also remain relatively stable, and once it has been formed, it can have a reaction upon the mode of production, and will in turn affect, to a certain extent, all aspects of society, politics, economy, culture and even nature.

By taking the development of the mode of production as the main line, Marx has elucidated the basic trajectory of the revolutions in the mode of life of human society, and based on the state of development of human existence and the development trajectory of the revolutions in the mode of life, he also determined the degree of development of society, embodied in the social change and social transformation, and highlighted the features of the different phases of development of society, thus scientifically revealed the basic laws of development of the history of society, and constructed the theoretical system of the materialist conception of history with the revolutions in the mode of production and the mode of life as an important clue. This category not only has an important place in Marxist philosophy, but also has a very important significance for revolutionizing and perfecting the mode of production and mode of life of contemporary society. In socialist China, under the guidance of Marxism, we should build an active, healthy, civilized, and harmonious socialist mode of life appropriate to the construction of socialist modernization.