Production

“ The three requisites of production, as has been so often repeated, are labour, capital, and land: understanding by capital, the means and appliances which are the accumulated results of previous labour, and by land, the materials and instruments supplied by nature, whether contained in the interior of the earth, or constituting its surface. ”

“ We have surveyed the field of economical facts, and have examined how they stand related to one another as causes and effects; what circumstances determine the amount of production, of employment for labour, of capital and population; what laws regulate rent, profits, and wages; under what conditions and in what proportions commodities are interchanged between individuals and between countries. We have thus obtained a collective view of the economical phenomena of society, considered as existing simultaneously. ”

“ The circumstances of production are the result, the productive forces are the cause. But the effect becomes a cause in its turn; the circumstances of production become a new source of the development of the productive forces. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We may, therefore, consider the capital of a producer as measured by the means which he has of possessing himself of the different essentials of production: namely, labour, and the various articles which labour requires as materials, or of which it avails itself as aids. ”

“ The importance of these considerations becomes all the clearer to us when we reflect on the fact that the mere production of commodities, and the production of the means of production, form but a part of the processes which advance, maintain, and indeed constitute civilisation. ”

“ In every society in which production has developed naturally, to which class that of to-day belongs, the producers do not master the means of production but the means of production dominate the producers. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ So unintentionally has there arisen the elaborate division of labor by which production and distribution are now carried on, that only in modern days has there come a recognition of the fact that it has all along been arising. ”

“ The last word which we have to define is "Production."
I have hitherto spoken of all labour as profitable; because it is impossible to consider under one head the quality or value of labour, and its aim. But labour of the best quality may be various in aim. ”

“ The value form of the product of labour is not only the most abstract, but is also the most universal form, taken by the product in bourgeois production, and stamps that production as a particular species of social production, and thereby gives it its special historical character. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ We may say, then, without a greater stretch of language than under the necessary explanation is permissible, that the requisites of production are Labour, Capital, and Land. The increase of production, therefore, depends on the properties of these elements. ”

“ The influence exercised on production by the separation of employments, is more fundamental than, from the mode in which the subject is usually treated, a reader might be induced to suppose. It is not merely that when the production of different things becomes the sole or principal occupation of different persons, a much greater quantity of each kind of article is produced. ”

“ The directing motive, the end and aim of capitalist production, is to extract the greatest possible amount of surplus-value, [14] and consequently to exploit labour-power to the greatest possible extent. ”

“ When such extensive designs shall have been completed, the landowner, farmer, grazier, trader, manufacturer, and merchant will vie with each other, in the lasting benefit, splendour, and glory which such expanded views of science will send forth to the productive classes and the consumers of the production of the earth. ”

“ On the other hand, at all stages of social development, the process of production is based on the continuation of two different, though closely connected factors, the technical and social conditions—on the precise relationship between man and nature and that between men and men. ”

“ And both are the result of a process of formation which rests altogether upon the new mode of production of the objects necessary to life, that is to say, which rests altogether upon the manner of economic production. ”

“ So, as civilization developed, production came to be spread over a considerable period of time, until today it often happens that a whole year intervenes between the first step in production and the sale of the finished article. Consider the articles of daily use, clothes, shoes, furniture, books, and realize how vast has been the series of operations necessary to produce each of them! Many workers have contributed their share, and each of these has had to receive his wages long before the goods passed into the hands of the ultimate consumer. ”

“ Capitalist production, therefore, developes technology, and the combining together of various processes into a social whole, only by sapping the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the labourer. ”

“ In general, the greater the productiveness of labour, the less is the labour-time required for the production of an article, the less is the amount of labour crystallised in that article, and the less is its value; ”

“ 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. ”

“ In the social production which men carry on they enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material powers of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society—the real foundation, on which rise legal and political superstructures and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. ”

“ The condition of life to which people of the well-to-do classes are accustomed is that of an abundant production of various articles necessary for their comfort and pleasure, and these things are obtained only thanks to the existence of factories and works organized as at present. And, therefore, discussing the improvement of the workers' position, the men of science belonging to the well- to-do classes always have in view only such improvements as will not do away with the system of factory-production and those conveniences of which they avail themselves. ”

“ 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. ”

“ There are four fundamental facts connected with the subject, viz., the points of production, places of consumption, methods of operation and means of communication. Production is upon the farm, consumption in the cities and towns, methods, to be determined by experience, and the mode and means of conveyance, a government function.
Regarding the first of these divisions, certain facts are apparent. The balance of trade, eight to one is against the farmer at the point of production; he receives very much more than he sends. ”

“ Yet, when employment conditions are improved to match the improvements in machinery and production, we shall go back to the ancient shop for the fundamental principles upon which the new and better relationship will be built. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But all stages of production have certain landmarks in common, common purposes. Production in general is an abstraction, but it is a rational abstraction, in so far as it singles out and fixes the common features, thereby saving us repetition. ”

“ The laws of the production of manufactured articles involve the whole of chemistry and the whole of mechanics. The laws of the production of the wealth which is extracted from the bowels of the earth, cannot be set forth without taking in a large part of geology. ”

“ If production be capitalistic in form, so, too, will be reproduction. ”

“ All production is for the purpose of ultimately satisfying a consumer. ”

“ Capital is a result of labor, and is used by labor to assist it in further production. Labor is the active and initial force, and labor is therefore the employer of capital. ”

“ The whole mystery of commodities, all the magic and necromancy that surrounds the products of labour as long as they take the form of commodities, vanishes therefore, so soon as we come to other forms of 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. ”

“ The principle of those illustrations applies to the whole Productive Process. By division of Labor, that is to say, by Labor specialization, Economic accomplishment is multiplied beyond all the possibilities of isolated individual production. ”

“ Capital therefore, announces from its first appearance a new epoch in the process of social 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. ”

“ In industry it is difficult to recognize, because every civilized nation in a healthy state of development must present an extension of industrial production, for the following four reasons: 1. Because occupations that were formerly domestic in character have been taken over by industry. ”

“ The spirit of enterprise, useful and prolific as it is, must necessarily be contracted or expanded in proportion to the simplicity or variety of the occupations and productions which are to be found in a society. It must be less in a nation of mere cultivators than in a nation of cultivators and merchants; less in a nation of cultivators and merchants than in a nation of cultivators, artificers, and merchants.
7. As to the Creating, in Some Instances, a New and Securing in All a More Certain and Steady Demand for the Surplus Produce of the Soil. ”

“ If this argument is applicable to nature and labour as agents in the {198} production of commodities, it is equally applicable to the few and the many as agents in the production of social progress generally ”