In general, this term—in German Produktionverhältnisse—refers to those relationships which arise out of the actual production process and also, of course, to ownership relations of which the most important is property. Like forces of production, it is a technical term from the theory of historical materialism. According to Marx, the most fundamental ownership relation, under capitalism at least, is bourgeois ownership of the means of production, an ownership which also manifests itself in a monopoly of political power. The precise relationship between forces and relations of production is ambiguous, and the sense or senses in which a contradiction between forces and relations constitutes the dynamic of history is obscure.

— John Halliday

The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Politics. Copyright © 1996, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.