The next floor of the pyramid of society – the economic mode of production, the economic system (production) relations. Its main elements: the structure of reproduction, type of ownership (assignment) of production and its results, methods of distribution of product produced between members of reproduction, members of the society, ways of exchanging, circulating in a society of wealth produced, the forms economic governance, regulatory and motivational mechanism, inducing individual employees, the reproductive units of the most effective results. Each civilization characterized by certain relations elements of reproduction and industries, the structure of economic relations. Neolithic civilization was based on communal ownership, equal distribution, barter, the direct managing work-in primary forms of social division of labor. Early class and ancient civilization – on a private assignment (individually or collectively) and the means of production workers in conjunction with communities and small privately owned free farmers and artisans, minimal rations for slaves, the growth of commodity exchange (covering only part of the product of social production), extra-economic coercion and state public works (construction and management of irrigation systems, construction of the pyramids, palaces, temples).
For pre-industrial civilizations and medieval characterized by the feudal caste ("high rise"), land ownership and partial – for production workers (serfs and artisans) in the personal property of the peasant families in the tools, semi-bourgeois property with elements of wage labor in handicraft, industry, construction and trade in the "free cities", the formation of a developed market and monetary mechanisms. For civilization is characterized by economic system based on relations of capital and wage labor, the rule of market relations. Economic mode of production goes through certain stages in their development to meet phase of its life cycle. However, it should be noted that in "pure" form of economic relations do not exist. In every era coexist, complement each other and opposed by various economic patterns: dominant, typical for this mode of production or its phase, more or less significant remnants of the old, previously prevailing ways of life; elements, the germs of future emerging patterns, for which historical time has not come yet. In periods of transition there is a relative balance and a keen rivalry of the outgoing and incoming ways of life, so here is correct to speak of the predominance of a mixed economy.