Productive forces
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- ''For the specific theoretical justifications behind the Great Leap Forward and the Five Year Plans, see Theory of Productive Forces.
All those forces which are applied by people in the production process (body & brain, tools & techniques, materials, resources and equipment) are encompassed by this concept, including those management and engineering functions technically indispensable for production (as contrasted with social control functions). Human knowledge can also be a productive force.
Together with the social and technical relations of production, the productive forces constitute an historically specific mode of production.
Productive forces and labor
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 that earn money. 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 exchangeable commodities). This situation did not exist in pre-capitalist society, because trade in means of production and human labour power was heavily restricted both by legally defined ownership relations, and by inadequate technologies.
As a corollary, capital itself, being one of the factors of production, comes to be viewed in capitalist society as a productive force in its own right, 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.
A quote from Marx & Engels on the productive forces
Productive force determinism
- See article: Theory of Productive Forces
Productive forces and the reification of technology
Other 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.
Productive forces and productivity
Marx's concept of productive forces also has some relevance for discussions in economics about the meaning and measurement of productivity.
Modern economics theorises productivity in terms of the marginal product of the factors of production. Marx theorises productivity within the capitalist mode of production in terms of the social and technical relations of production, with the concept of the organic composition of capital and the value product. He suggests there is no completely neutral view of productivity possible; how productivity is defined depends on the values and interests people have. Thus, different social classes have different notions of productivity reflecting their own station in life, and giving rise to different notions of productive and unproductive labour.
Critique of technology
In the romantic or ecological critique of technology, technical progress boosting productivity often does not mean human progress at all. The design of production technologies may not be suited to human needs or human health, or technologies may be used in ways which do more harm than good. In that case, productive forces are transformed into destructive forces.
Sometimes this view leads to cultural pessimism or a theory of "Small is beautiful" as proposed by E. F. Schumacher. Ideas about alternative technology are also proposed. All of this suggests that the technologies we have, are only options which have been chosen from different technical possibilities existing at the time, and that the same technologies can be used for good or for ill, in different contexts.
A technology may be chosen because it is profitable, and once adopted on a mass scale, it may be difficult to create alternatives to it, particularly because it becomes integrated with other technologies and a whole "life style" (e.g. petrol-fueled cars). Yet that may not mean that the technology is ultimately desirable for human life on earth.
Productive force determinism is then criticised on the ground that whatever technologies are adopted, these are the result of human choices between technical alternatives, influenced by the human interests and stakes existing at the time. What may be presented as a pre-determined "technical necessity" may in reality have more to do with considerations of political, sociological, or economic power.
Advocates of technological progress however argue that even if admittedly "progress may have its price", without technical innovation there would be no progress at all; the same people who criticize technology also depend on it for their everyday existence.
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
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