Mode of production

“ Passing now from the purely technical and material side of the problem of production, we come to the human factor, the motives leading men to work, the possibilities of efficient organization of production, and the connection of production with distribution. ”

“ Under the stimulus of this the wheels of industry hummed. Factories covered the land. National production grew to a colossal size and the whole outer world seemed laid under a tribute to the great industry. ”

“ Turning our attention again to the industrial organism, we shall strive to ascertain the chief changes that have been brought about in the size and structural character of industry, in the relations of the several parts of the industrial world, of the several trades which constitute industry, of the processes within these trades, of the businesses or units which comprise a trade or a market, and of the units of capital and labour comprising a business. It will then remain to undertake closer studies of certain important special outcomes of machinery and factory production. ”

“ Neither attenuated analysis nor scholastic logic is necessary to understand the scope and coordination of the modern productive pattern and the integral part played by those who manage and direct the physical processes of production. ”

“ If we confine our attention to some particular lot of raw materials, of rags, for instance, in paper manufacture, or of wire in needle manufacture, we perceive that it passes in succession through a series of stages in the hands of the various detail workmen until completion. On the other hand, if we look at the workshop as a whole, we see the raw material in all the stages of its production at the same time. ”

“ Thus in the evolution of the modern business we see not only a number of processes in the production of a commodity, each of which constituted a separate business-unit in the earlier division of labour, growing together into a large complex whole, but a growing together of analogous processes in the production of different commodities, a lateral aggregation of processes. ”

“ But the difficulties of the organization of production and circulation can be diminished in other directions as well as by a decrease in the number of plants. Production can be divided into two great fields; those in which the production is for consumption and those in which production is for production. The production of means of production, thanks to the extensive division of labor, has become to-day the most important portion of production and it continues to increase steadily. ”

“ In order to estimate the progress that industry will achieve in the sphere of production during the coming time, it must be remembered that, if industry is the action of man upon matter, modern science has only within the last few years begun to account for what matter is. ”

“ Furthermore, although it may seem a very simple thing to provide that those who do the manual work shall have all the product, it is plain, so soon as we reflect upon the complicated combinations of labor which are involved in any case of production, and also upon the complicated character of modern "products" and the way in which they contribute to, and depend upon each other, that it would be impracticable to divide the products among those who have done the labor part of production. ”

“ It is too narrow an understanding of production which confines it merely to the making of things. Production includes not merely the making of things, but the bringing of them to the consumer. The merchant or storekeeper is thus as truly a producer as is the manufacturer, or farmer, and his stock or capital is as much devoted to production as is theirs. ”

“ Production is but a leading forth; it is but movement. We move the cotton-seed to the soil, the cotton to the Northern mill, the cloth to the seaboard; then, by the steamship, we move it to where it is more needed than by ourselves; we move back the tea, and the tea is but the final product of the labor of the freedman, the operative, and the sailor, each of whom is or may be our countryman, and each of whom is counted as a representative of home industry. ”

“ As the productive forces expand, through greater skill on the part of the worker, through discoveries of new raw material and markets, through the invention of new labour processes, tools and machines, and through the better organisation of trade and exchange, so that the material basis or the economic foundation of society is altered, then the old conditions of production cease to promote the interests of production. ”

“ The principal thing to ascertain is the number and the nature of the forces that are available, the quantity and nature of the means of production,—the factories, workshops, means of transportation and communication, land—and also their productivity. ”

“ On the contrary, within this last generation a number of discoveries have taken place in almost all the chief industrial arts, in the opening up of new supplies of raw material, and in the improvement of industrial organisation, which have registered enormous advances of productive power. ”

“ As I have said before there is a common supposition among people who are not employers of labor, that such features of industry as the mechanical devices of modern technology and the division of labor in factory organization, are in their nature opposed to the expansive development of the people involved; that these features of apparent intrinsic importance to mass production, are antagonistic to individual growth and to the interest of workers in productive effort. ”

“ Factory legislation, that first conscious and methodical reaction of society against the spontaneously developed form of the process of production, is, as we have seen, just as much the necessary product of modern industry as cotton yarn, self-actors, and the electric telegraph. ”

“ English manufacturing industry in the first half of the eighteenth century furnishes a variety of different forms of business of widely different nature and complexity. The simplest form of manufacturing industry is that in which an industrial family owning the raw material and the requisite tools, and working with the power of their own bodies in their own homes, produce commodities for their own consumption. ”

“ In so far then, as its instruments and subjects are themselves products, labour consumes products in order to create products, or in other words, consumes one set of products by turning them into means of production for another set. ”

“ Or reversely, we may take Industry as a whole, the Industrial Organism as it exists at any given time, consider the nature and extent of the cohesion existing between its several parts, and, further, resolving these parts into their constituent elements, gain a close understanding of the extent to which differentiation of industrial functions has been carried in the several divisions. ”

“ When we add together the labour spent in producing the machinery to assist the enlarged production, the labour spent in maintaining and working the same, and the labour of conveying and distributing the enlarged production, it will be found that more labour is required under the new than under the old conditions of industry. ”

“ What, then, is production? It is the application of labor to the raw materials that nature provides for the making of things that satisfy human desires. Nothing can be produced in any other way. True, there are things men want that apparently do not involve the use of raw materials, things that are usually described as services. ”

“ Means of production play an ever growing part in the productive process and on the commodity market. Compared to the machine, the worker recedes further into the background and the demand resulting from the consumption of the workers is also put into the shade by that which results from productive consumption by the means of production. ”

“ Mines, factories and mills of all kinds, large business houses and stores, together with those farms whose owners would employ hired labor for the production of goods to be sold at profit, would all be looked upon as being among the principal means of production. ”

“ The spirit of Invention, one of the chief conditions in the production of material commodities, thus simply illustrated along the line of a single manufacture, may serve us for a sample of similar improvements taken and taking place in scores upon scores of other lines of effort and production. ”

“ Scarcely a single article of consumption comes from the hand of a single producer, but all run through a number of productive processes so that those who finally fit it for our use are only the last in a long row of producers. The production of articles for consumption and for the means of production have a wholly different character. The production for further production belongs to the domain of gigantic industries such as the iron industry, mining, etc. ”

“ The system certainly solved the problem of production. Under its whips and in search of its prizes, mechanical invention proceeded apace, labour was organised and its efficiency multiplied ten, twenty, an hundred fold. ”

“ The extension of the market in early modern times, requiring a vastly increased production of goods of standard kinds, led first to excessive division of labor and later to the invention of machinery. ”

“ It is the application of machinery to agriculture and the general tendency to production on a large scale. The same tendency which substitutes the factory, with its army of operatives, for many independent hand-loom weavers, is beginning to exhibit itself in agriculture. ”

“ As modern industrial societies develop they disclose certain material wants which are common to all or most members, and are less subject to fluctuations in quantity or quality of demand than others. These routine wants, representing that part of consumption which is common, can be supplied most economically by highly organised machinery and highly concentrated methods of production. ”

“ The Requisites of Production. The first thing in industry, as we now see, is to decide what we want; the next thing is to get it, or make it, or, as we shall say, produce it, and we ought obviously to produce it with the least possible labour. To learn how this may be done, we must inquire what is needful for the production of wealth. There are, as is commonly and correctly said, three requisites of production ”

“ Another of our important problems is the distribution of raw materials. We cannot say that we have sufficient raw materials, but we have enough to fill present requirements, and we can hold out for a considerable time with our own production. We have made a thorough inventory and only those factories are supplied which are held to be absolutely in need. ”

“ They all require means of production which, having resulted from human labour, express the link between human labour and natural matter, and constitute the eternal and universal prerequisites of the human process of [Pg 73] production. c in the formula c + v + s stands for a certain function of the means of production which is not wiped out in the succession of the labour process. ”

“ Large investments of capital, specialization in production, the use of machinery in every process, and the consequent subdivision of labor in particular lines in which the technical skill of the handicraftsman is not required, together with the utilization of waste products and the rapid exchange of commodities, mark the progress of activity in the industrial arts. ”

“ In glancing down this list of the chief industries engaged in the production of commercial wealth, it will be recognised at once that the manufacturing and transport industries are those to which steam-power and the economies of large production have been especially applied. ”

“ One is, the [pg 389] tendency of every extension of the market to improve the processes of production. A country which produces for a larger market than its own can introduce a more extended division of labor, can make greater use of machinery, and is more likely to make inventions and improvements in the processes of production. Whatever causes a greater quantity of anything to be produced in the same place tends to the general increase of the productive powers of the world.267 There is (2) another consideration, principally applicable to an early stage of industrial advancement. ”

“ It must include all the various kinds of labor required in a specific industry; labor of every kind which contributes to the production of the commodity for the making of which the industry exists; all the various factors which combine to form the marketable object. ”

“ From the bowels and the treasures of the earth labor puts out the material for fuel and the essential things which, after being transformed, comprise the implements and machinery of production and distribution. With the matter thus furnished production proper for the providing of all necessary things of life and comfort is carried on in the various, but inter-depending places of production, mills and factories. ”

“ The economy of effort for industrial purposes requires that a larger and larger proportion of inventive genius and enterprise shall be directed to an interminable displacement of handicraft by machinery in the construction of machinery, and a smaller proportion to the relatively unimportant work of perfecting manufacturing machinery in the detailed processes of each manufacture engaged in the direct satisfaction of some human want. ”

“ The change, at first view, is not striking, for the manufacturing was still done by petty artisans working at home with their own tools. The ownership of the raw material, however, had passed from the artisans to an employer, who took the risk of the manufacture and reaped profits corresponding to his success in conducting it.
Brain power now took a place in manufactures above hand power. The new class of employers were men who could devote their energy entirely to studying the larger questions212 of production. ”