As noted earlier, it is production that has the primary role, but distribution, exchange and consumption, are not simply passive functions of it. Value determines what can be produced, and in what proportions, whereas use value determines what is produced within those constraints. In other words, it determines in what proportions available labour and resources are allocated to maximise use-value/utility/welfare. But, in class societies, distribution, then, also determines what this maximisation of use-value/utility/welfare means, for that mode of production. It takes as given initial factor endowments.
The amassing of treasure hoards may maximise the ability of ruling classes/castes, but hardly for the millions of their subjects. The same with the swelling ranks of feudal retainers, the conspicuous consumption of private industrial capitalists, and, today, the inflating of asset price bubbles, by a ruling-class of owners of fictitious-capital. But, the fact that these ruling classes obtain this potential for consumption and consequently for the shaping of demand, and allocation of labour and resources, is, itself, a consequence of distribution, and that distribution is a function of their ownership, or control, over production.
It is the control over the state that determines distribution. But, the class nature of the state is determined by the mode of production. The AMP gives the form of the state, for example, in which a bureaucratic caste enriches itself, not from ownership of means of production, but from its ultimate control of them, via its control of the state itself, and its ability to appropriate the surplus product. Under feudalism, land is the fundamental means of production, and land ownership or domain determines the mode of production, and class nature of the state. Under capitalism, capital is the fundamental means of production, and ownership and control of it determines the mode of production, and class nature of the state.
But, in each of these cases, the state, as the state of the ruling class, which arises on the back of each new mode of production, continues to determine distribution relations, even after the productive relations that gave rise to it have become a fetter on the development of the productive forces themselves. The feudal state apparatus sought to maintain the previous distribution relations, by taxing the profits of capital, for example. The capitalist state, today, seeks to preserve the distribution relations by giving shareholders control over capital they do not own, i.e. the socialised capital of the associated producers, and, thereby, allowing them to continue to obtain excessive revenues from interest/dividends, and realised capital gains.
In each case, those contradictions inevitably reach a breaking point, at which the new productive relations exert themselves, and result in a political revolution, whereby, the new ruling class exerts its control over the state.
“Distribution, however, is not a merely passive result of production and exchange; it reacts just as much on both. Each new mode of production or form of exchange is at first obstructed not only by the old forms and their corresponding political institutions, but also by the old mode of distribution; it must first secure the distribution which corresponds to it in the course of a long struggle.” (p 189)
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