Productive forces

NML:

Productive forces, productive powers, or forces of production German: Produktivkräfte is the central picture in Marxism together with historical materialism.

In Karl Marx in addition to Friedrich Engels' own critique of political economy, it subject to the combination of the means of labor tools, machinery, land, infrastructure, and so on with human labour power. Marx and Engels probably derived the concept from Adam Smith's address to the "productive powers of labour" see e.g. chapter 8 of The Wealth of Nations 1776, although the German political economist Friedrich List also mentions the concept of "productive powers" in The National System of Political Economy 1841.

All those forces which are applied by people in the production process body and brain, tools and techniques, materials, resources, generation of workers' cooperation, and equipment are encompassed by this concept, including those administration and technology functions technically indispensable for production as contrasted with social a body or process by which energy or a particular part enters a system. functions. Human knowledge can also be a productive force.

Together with the social and technical relations of production, the productive forces cost a historically specific mode of production.

Labor

Karl Marx emphasized that with few exceptions means of labour are not a productive force unless they are actually operated, supports and conserved by living human labour. Without applying alive human labour, their physical precondition and usefulness would deteriorate, depreciate, or be destroyed an example would be a ghost town or capital depreciation due to strike action.

Capital itself, being one of the factors of production, comes to be viewed in capitalist society as a productive force in its own right, freelancer from labour, a referred 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 labour", i.e. the power to direct or imposing of property usage to guidance human power and labour-time, and thus of inanimate "things" to exert an autonomous power over people. What disappears from conception is that the power of capital depends in the last exercise on human cooperation.

"The production of life, both of one’s own in labour and of fresh life in procreation... appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship. By social we understand the co-operation of several individuals, no matter under what conditions, in what family and to what end. It follows from this that amode of production, or industrial stage, is always combined with amode of co-operation, or social stage, and this mode of co-operation is itself a “productive force.”

The productive power of cooperation comes to be viewed as the productive power of capital, because this is the capital which forcibly organises people, rather than people organising capital. Marx regarded this as a supreme reification.

Unlike British classical economics, Marxian economics classifies financial capital as being an component of the relations of production, rather than the factors or forces of production "not a thing, but a social report between persons, established by the instrumentality of things".