Productive forces

“ It is this certainty that we have such a command of the productive powers of nature as will abundantly compensate us for the incessant labour of directing those forces, which has during a long course of industry heaped up our manifold accumulations, and which enables production annually to go forward to an extent which even half a century ago would have been thought impossible. The long succession of labour, which has covered this country with wealth, has been applied to the encouragement of the productive forces of nature, and the restraint of the destroying. ”

“ Their deliverance from these bonds is the one pre-condition for an unbroken, constantly accelerated development of the productive forces, and therewith for a practically unlimited increase of production itself. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In mills where the giant power of steam drives machinery that multiplies by hundreds and thousands the productive forces of man, there are working little children who ought to be at play or at school; where the mechanism of exchange has been perfected to the utmost, there thousands of men are vainly trying to exchange their labor for the necessaries of life! ”

“ The conditions of production are the work of men in society. Just as men produce various material goods out of the materials and forces made available to them by Nature, so they create out of the reactions of the productive forces upon the mind definite social, political, and legal institutions, as well as systems of religion, morals, and philosophy. ”

“ The growth of population, the increase and extension of exchanges, the discoveries of science, the march of invention, the spread of education, the improvement of government, and the amelioration of manners, considered as material forces, have all a direct tendency to increase the productive power of labor—not281 of some labor, but of all labor; not in some departments of industry, but in all departments of industry; for the law of the production of wealth in society is the law of “each for all, and all for each.” ”

“ The personal productive forces are: the labourers, the inventors, discoverers, engineers, and finally, the qualities of the race—the inherited capacities of specific groups of men, which facilitate work. ”

“ Accordingly, since each of the power units employed in the work was simultaneously both producer and consumer, a certain natural limit was placed on the accumulation of productive forces in any one locality. ”

“ It has consequently had a great economic importance, and has created such gigantic productive forces that the framework of commodity production becomes too narrow, as at one time the framework of the primitive social or co-operative, production became too narrow for the growing division of labour. ”

“ The second exception, of which I shall speak at length in a subsequent chapter, consists in the known effect of an extension of the market for a commodity, in rendering possible an increased development of the division of labour, and hence a more effective distribution of the productive forces of society. ”

“ By decomposition of handicrafts, by specialisation of the instruments of labour, by the formation of detail labourers, and by grouping and combining the latter into a single mechanism, division of labour in manufacture creates a qualitative gradation, and a quantitative proportion in the social process of production; it consequently creates a definite organization of the labour of society, and thereby developes at the same time new productive forces in the society. ”

“ The period of accumulation of Capital consists of an expanded reproduction of productive forces accompanied by a constant reproduction of social relations. At a low level of development of productive forces, the means of survival are scarce, there is little surplus and society is constrained by this material scarcity to expend its productive energy ensuring its survival; productive activity is forced labor. ”

“ The revolutionary changes in society depend on two groups of phenomena, which, although casually connected with each other, yet work differently. One of these groups of phenomena is technical, and consists in changes in the productive forces. ”

“ Since steam, machinery, and the making of machines by machinery transformed the older manufacture into modern industry, the productive forces evolved under the guidance of the bourgeoisie developed with a rapidity and in a degree unheard of before. But just as the older manufacture, in its time, and handicraft, becoming more developed under its influence, had come into collision with the feudal trammels of the guilds, so now modern industry, in its more complete development, comes into collision with the bounds within which the capitalist mode of production holds it confined. ”

“ In the social production of their lives, men enter upon certain definite, necessary relations, relations independent of their will, relations of production that correspond with definite degrees of development of their material productive forces. The totality of these relations of ] [32] production constitute the economic structure of society, the true basis from which arises a juridical and political superstructure to which definite social forms of consciousness correspond. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual processes of life. ”

“ The productive forces that have been generated in capitalist society have become irreconcilable with the very system of property upon which it is built. The endeavor to uphold this system of property renders impossible all further social development, condemns society to stagnation and decay—a decay that is accompanied by the most painful convulsions. ”

“ To accomplish this, this total commodity has to be returned in fragmented form to fragmented individuals who are completely cut off from the overall operation of the productive forces. To this end the specialized science of domination is broken down into further specialties such as sociology, applied psychology, cybernetics, and semiology, which oversee the self-regulation of every phase of the process. ”

“ The new productive forces have already outgrown the capitalistic mode of using them. And this conflict between productive forces and modes of production is not a conflict engendered in the mind of man, like that between original sin and divine justice. It exists, in fact, objectively, outside us, independently of the will and actions even of the men that have brought it on. Modern Socialism is nothing but the reflex, in thought, of this conflict in fact ”

“ The nation lives by its productive industry, whereof there are these five chief departments:—Hunting and Fishing, the appropriation of the spontaneous live products of the land and sea; Agriculture, the use of the productive forces of the earth's surface ”

“ This:—That there is a broad path open, through a creation of new wealth forms, to a new industrial system in which the productive forces of society and of nature may be used with far greater effectiveness than at present, and in which the distribution of the wealth forms so created will take place on a far juster and more equitable basis. Society may have more to divide among its members, and at the same time the greater dividend may be divided in a juster manner. ”

“ The stagnation lasts for years; productive forces and products are wasted and destroyed wholesale, until the accumulated mass of commodities finally filter off, more or less depreciated in value, until production and exchange gradually begin to move again. Little by little the pace quickens. It becomes a trot. The industrial trot breaks into a canter, the canter in turn grows into the headlong gallop of a perfect steeplechase of industry, commercial credit, and speculation, which finally, after breakneck leaps, ends where it began—in the ditch of a crisis. ”

“ On the one hand, therefore, the capitalistic mode of production stands convicted of its own incapacity to further direct these productive forces. On the other, these productive forces, themselves, with increasing energy, press forward to the removal of the existing contradiction, to the abolition of their quality as capital, to the practical recognition of their character as social productive forces. ”

“ As a form of personified power—as a personification of the productive power estranged by the creators of the productive forces—Capital enjoyed years of progress, in fact several centuries of glorious unfettered development, while it traveled inflexibly back to the very spot on which its predecessor had died unmourned. ”

“ The newly-created gigantic productive forces, hitherto used only to enrich individuals and to enslave the masses, offered to Owen the foundations for a reconstruction of society; they were destined, as the common property of all, to be worked for the common good of all. ”