Productive forces

Productive forces or 'forces of production' [in German, Produktivkrafte] is a central concept in Marxism and historical materialism. It refers to the combination of the means of production with human labour power. All those forces applied by people in the production process are encompassed by this concept. Together with the social and technical relations of production, the productive forces constitute an historically specific mode of production.

Karl Marx emphasized that, with few exceptions, means of production are not a productive force unless they are actually operated, maintained and conserved by living human labor. Without applying living human labor, their physical condition and value would deteriorate, depreciate, or be destroyed (an example would be a ghost town or capital depreciation due to strike action).

In addition, Marx shows that in capitalist society, the productive forces take the form of, or appear as, capital i.e. tradeable assets. The reason is, that in such a society, both means of production and human labour-power are alienable as more or less freely traded commercial goods (as an exchangeable commodity). As a corollary, capital itself, being one of the factors of production, comes to be viewed as a productive force independent from labor, a subject with a life of its own. Indeed, Marx sees the essence of what he calls 'the capital relation' as being summarised by the circumstance that "capital buys labor", i.e. the power of property ownership to command human energy and labor-time, and thus of inanimate "things" to exert an autonomous power over people.

According to some Marxist and liberal interpretations, influenced by modernism, social engineering and technocracy, a productive force determinism operates in human history (for examples see e.g. Joseph V. Stalin's and Gerald A. Cohen's work). According to this view, the fundamental cause of social change is technical change, and changes in the means of production linearly cause changes in relations of production. It is doubtful however whether this view was held by Marx himself, who saw social change in history as emerging essentially from the dyssynchrony between productive forces and relations of production, and who emphasized living human subjects as the central productive force (subjects who also actively produced and reproduced their social relations).

Other Marxist interpretations, sometimes influenced by postmodernism and the concept of commodity fetishism have by contrast emphasized the reification of the powers of technology, said to occur by the separation of technique from the producers, and by falsely imputing human powers to technology as autonomous force, the effect being a perspective of inevitable and unstoppable technological progress operating beyond any human control, and impervious to human choices.

In turn, this is said to have the effect of naturalising and legitimating social arrangements produced by people, by asserting that they are technically inevitable. The error here seems to be that that social relations between people are confused and conflated with technical relations between people and things, and object relations between things; but this error is said to be a spontaneous result of the operation of a universal market and the process of commercialization.

Marx's concept of productive forces also has some relevance for discussions in economics about the meaning and measurement of productivity. In the romantic critique of technology, technical progress often does not mean human progress at all.

References:

• Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, and: The German Ideology.
• Karl Marx, "The Trinity Formula", chapter 48 in volume 3 of Marx's 'Capital'.
• Josef V. Stalin, Dialectical and Historical Materialism.
• Gerald A. Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History.
• Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism.
• Isaac I. Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory of value.
• Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx's Conception of Man in Capitalist Society.
• Kostas Axelos, Alienation, Praxis and Techne in the Thought of Karl Marx.
• Peter L. Berger, Pyramids of Sacrifice.
• John Kenneth Galbraith, The New Industrial State.
• Jacques Ellul, The Technological Society.
• Leo Kofler, Technologische Rationalität im Spätkapitalismus.
• Anwar Shaikh, "Laws of Production and Laws of Algebra: The Humbug Production Function", in The Review of Economics and Statistics, Volume 56(1), February 1974, p. 115-120.
• Fransisco Louça and Christopher Freeman, As Time Goes By; From the Industrial Revolutions to the Information Revolution.
• David F. Noble, Progress Without People: In Defense of Luddism