Productive power

“ 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.” ”

“ Material must be bought and sold, wages and salaries must be paid, employes must be selected and fitted into the respective processes according to their equipment in knowledge and skill, and the highest productive energy must be evoked from each employe by the proper play upon his motives. Altogether the problem is one of economizing the technical abilities of individ- uals, that is, of increasing the productive power of each group with the least sacrifices and concessions to other groups and to the associated individuals within the group. ”

“ Does that not show clearly enough that the means of production, the conditions under which productive power is developed, are anything but eternal laws, that they rather correspond to a definite stage in the evolution of mankind and of its productive power, and that a variation in the productive power of mankind necessarily brings about a variation in its conditions of production? ”

“ 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. ”

“ Notwithstanding the enormous increase of productive power by the universal introduction of labor-saving machinery and the discovery of new agents for the increase of wealth, the task of the laborer is scarcely lightened, the hours of toil are but little shortened, and few producers are lifted from poverty into comfort and pecuniary independence. ”

“ Under these circumstances the entire source of productive power lay in the will-energies of living beings, whose bodies had to be supplied with food, clothing and housing; and to provide these, other productive powers of a similar kind were required near the same place. ”

“ Under that system productive power has increased, not because capital has enabled a few men to remain idle, but because it has enabled a few men to apply, with the most constant and intense effort, their intellectual faculties to industry in its minutest details. ”

“ Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving, though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. ”

“ It is true that wealth has been greatly increased, and that the average of comfort, leisure, and refinement has been raised; but these gains are not general. In them the lowest class do not share. [1] I do not mean that the9 condition of the lowest class has nowhere nor in anything been improved; but that there is nowhere any improvement which can be credited to increased productive power. I mean that the tendency of what we call material progress is in nowise to improve the condition of the lowest class in the essentials of healthy, happy human life. ”

“ As the labour which confers productive powers, whether of hand or of head, may be looked upon as part of the labour by which society accomplishes its productive operations, or in other words, as part of what the produce costs to society, so too may the labour employed in keeping up productive powers ”

“ Then he and his fellows study to fit themselves to take control of this productive mechanism when it shall be transferred from the idle capitalist to the workers to whom it rightfully belongs.
443In every mill and every factory, every mine and every quarry, every railroad and every shop, everywhere, the workers, enlightened, understanding their self-interest, are correlating themselves in the industrial and economic mechanism. They are developing their industrial consciousness, their economic and political power ”

“ Man is surrounded by those productive principles, and is endowed with power to act upon them; and according to the amount of intelligence he possessess [possesses] and the labour he expends are the productive results. ”

“ The division of labour, however, so far as it can be introduced, occasions, in every art, a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labour. ”

“ The improvement in the productive powers of useful labour depends, first, upon the improvement in the ability of the workman; and, secondly, upon that of the machinery with which he works. But the labour of artificers and manufacturers, as it is capable of being more subdivided, and the labour of each workman reduced to a greater simplicity of operation, than that of farmers and country labourers ”

“ The annual produce of the land and labour of any nation can be increased in its value by no other means, but by increasing either the number of its productive labourers, or the productive powers of those labourers who had before been employed. ”

“ The conditions which govern the need of the productive system for labor may be summarized 64 as follows: Firstly, the consumption habits of the community, by which is decided the direction in which the productive powers are employed; secondly, the state of the productive arts, which governs the manner in which the various agents of production are combined for purposes of production; thirdly, the available supply of the agents of production, other than labor. ”

“ But there is not so distinct and positive a violation of usage in considering as wealth any product which is both useful and susceptible of accumulation. The skill, and the energy and perseverance, of the artisans of a country, are reckoned part of its wealth, no less than their tools and machinery. [1] According to this definition, we should regard all labour as productive which is employed in creating permanent utilities, whether embodied in human beings, or in any other animate or inanimate objects. ”

“ he thus forces the development of the productive powers of society, and creates those material conditions, which alone can form the real basis of a higher form of society, a society in which the full and free development of every individual forms the ruling principle. ”

“ Is it meant that the man who does any manual labor in connection with, or contribution to the production of a thing, should have the whole of that thing? Or, is it meant that the man who contributes manual labor to the productive enterprise should have all that part of the thing which belongs to the labor element, in proportion to the capital, land, and other elements which contribute to production? ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is quite true that all these kinds of labour are productive of utility; and the question which now occupies us could not have been a question at all, if the production of utility were enough to satisfy the notion which mankind have usually formed of productive labour. Production, and productive, are of course elliptical expressions, involving the idea of a something produced; but this something, in common apprehension, I conceive to be, not utility, but Wealth. Productive labour means labour productive of wealth. ”

“ This genius for simplification of processes, this wonderful knack of devising machinery which will do the work of the human hand, has multiplied the output of our factories: and this in turn has increased wages and decreased the hours of labor, and so brought a great uplift into the lives of our workmen; given them the power to provide better homes for their families, better education for their children, and greater leisure in which to work out a broader destiny for themselves. ”

“ It is still more obvious that common manual labour is impotent to produce the wealth of modern nations—that organisation, direction, and control are essential to productive work in the field of modern production, and are just as much a factor in it as mere physical effort. ”

“ The enormous increase of productiveness which we have exhibited, in so many operations of industry, is chiefly the result of production carried on upon a large scale, and working with every possible application of science. It is in this sense that Knowledge is Power; and skilled labour is a part of that power. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Labor is indispensable to production, but has not always production for its effect. There is much labor, and of a high order of usefulness, of which production is not the object. Labor has accordingly been distinguished into Productive and Unproductive. Productive labor means labor productive of wealth. ”

“ As the co-operative character of the labour-process becomes more and more marked, so, as a necessary consequence, does our notion of productive labour, and of its agent the productive labourer, become extended. ”

“ We know, however, from what has gone before, that the labour-process may continue beyond the time necessary to reproduce and incorporate in the product a mere equivalent for the value of the labour-power. ”

“ They are indeed the busy people and their accomplishment is the world's wealth. Nevertheless the intention of all and the spirit of the scheme is to do as near nothing as possible in exchange for the highest return. The whole industrial arrangement is carried on without the force of productive intention ”

“ From an Address on Success in Business.
=165.= THE BENEFICENCE OF LABOR-SAVING INVENTIONS. There is, if not an ever-increasing need, an ever-increasing consciousness of need, of labor-saving inventions and machinery. And, if those inventions should render labor twenty times as productive as it is to-day, should make this a general rule, that all human labor shall produce twenty times as much as it does to-day—there would be no glut of products, as so many mistakenly apprehend. There would only be a very much fuller and broader satisfaction of human needs. Our wants are infinite. ”

“ We criticize the activities in which they engage, the hitherto sacred professions and businesses, and learn to distinguish carefully between actually productive work for society, work which makes for the material and spiritual well-being of the people for whom it is done, and parasitic or wasteful work, which simply extends the friction of competition, or lives on the labor or profits of others. ”

“ Whenever, therefore, he pays for a service voluntarily, he acknowledges its productiveness. Lastly, from a national-economical point of view, all labor is considered productive which increases the quantity of goods exposed for sale in the market ”

“ The mental labor that guides and controls the physical is universal in industry, but becomes more and more a distinct and dominant factor as civilization increases.
Fidelity as affecting the Productivity of Labor.—The fact that all workmen are largely their own directors brings fidelity into the foreground as an element in determining men's earning power ”

“ But labor is more productive in proportion as it is more intelligent, [pg 022] as hand and mind keep pace with each other, as good moral habits generate order and voluntary discipline.
Economy is sacrifice, binding the present to the future, widening the horizon of thought, inspiring foresight, lengthening the lever of human activity, by providing it with new instruments. ”

“ The present century has been marked by a prodigious increase in wealth-producing power. The utilization of steam and electricity, the introduction of improved processes and labor-saving machinery, the greater subdivision and grander scale of production, the wonderful facilitation of exchanges, have multiplied enormously the effectiveness of labor. ”

“ Stone. “If you mean that productive labourers add more to the wealth of the society, the very way of putting the question shews that you are right: but we may see, in the case of every civilized state, that a mixture of productive and unproductive labourers is the best for the comfort and prosperity of society.” ”

“ You speak of the methods in economics that conserve energy and capital, such as the employ of the machine-guiding boy, which saves the labour power of a hundred men, and you hold that in the realm of personal life like methods may obtain with value and dignity. ”

“ But they contradict themselves almost in the next sentence, because they admit that efficiency of labour, which is another word for character, "is one of the factors of productivity, and the greater the national product the larger the number of persons it will maintain." ”

“ 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. ”