The productive forces are the unity of means of production and labour:
1. All labour (individual, union)
2. Instruments of production (buildings, machines)
3. Subjects of production (raw materials, labour)
The productive forces determine the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness.
Productive forces characterise the relations developing between a society and the nature. They represent itself as the leader, the most active, dynamically developing party of a social production. Thus the main productive force of a society is the person, the labourer.
The level of productive forces development is characterised by degree of a public division of labour and corresponding development of means of labour, first of all technicians, and also degree of development of industrial skills and the saved up scientific knowledge. In the conditions of modern scientific and technical progress the science is the direct productive force.
The productive relations are the objective material relations that exist in any society independently of human consciousness, formed between all people in the process of social production, exchange, and distribution of material wealth.
Production is not possible without relations of production – humans cannot produce outside of a social structure, whether a nation or a family – relations of production exist for all producers. The basis of the relations of production is ownership of the means of production. When the means of production become public property, then all people are able to exercise their freedom in relation to the productive forces through the social and political structures of society. To the extent that people enjoy equal rights they are thus able exercise these rights freely in the real development of society, unhindered by the barriers of private property. With the existence of private property, competition and exploitation hinder the real freedom of humans, where only a handful have ownership of the means of production. Throughout history social property appeared in the form of the property of the clan and the tribe (primitive communism), public or state property (socialism), cooperative and community property (communism), etc. – while private ownership appears in history through: slave property, feudal property, and capitalist property. From all forms of ownership correspond lesser or greater types of exploitation of human by human.
Production and consumption are two inseparable aspects of the production and reproduction of human life, but in modern society these concepts have become separated.
Before the socialisation of labour develops, and people produce for immediate consumption, production is identical with consumption because both are equally an expression of their life, “in taking in food, for example, which is a form of consumption, the human being produces his own body”. With the emergence of a social division of labour, consumption becomes separated from production, and must be mediated by a system of distribution and exchange. So instead of exercising our bodies in a healthy life-style, we earn a living doing inhuman, unhealthy work to pay for exercise, medicine, holidays, etc.
Production and consumption are identical in another way: production consumes labour-power and other products of labour, and is therefore equally consumption; production of labour-power entails consumption of food, education and so on and so forth, and is therefore equally consumption. Thus production of the means of production (Department I) is impossible without production of the means life (Department II) and vice versa, and the system of distribution and exchange must ensure the proper balance between the two.
Thus the system of distribution and exchange, which mediates between productive consumption and consumption in production is not just an entity external to production, but an integral part of the relations of production. The failure of the method of distribution and exchange to maintain proper coordination of consumption and production leads to crisis.
Further, the system of distribution and exchange (commerce) is not only inseparable from production and consumption (labour) but the system of distribution and exchange is one of the forces of production, production is constituted the cooperation of labour and therefore potentially in the exchange of labour and thus the system of distribution and exchange necessarily penetrates the labour process and becomes a part of it. This takes the form of commercialisation, privatisation, corporatisation and all the forms of socialisation of labour.
Equally, the system of production and consumption is an integral part of the system of distribution and exchange, which may be effected only in and through the process of production and consumption. It is not just that production provides the starting point and consumption the end point of distribution and exchange, nor just that distribution and exchange are themselves labour processes. Production and consumption are a means to distribution and exchange. Thus public spending serves to reduce unemployment and alleviate poverty, and so on.
The Mode of Production is the unity of the productive forces and the relations of production. Production begins with the development of its determinative aspect – the productive forces – which, once they have reached a certain level, come into conflict with the relations of production within which they have been developing. This leads to an inevitable change in the relations of production, since in the obsolete form they cease to be indispensable condition of the production process. In its turn, the change in the relations of production, which means the substitution of the new economic basis for the old one, leads to more less rapid change in the entire society. Therefore, the change in the Mode of Production comes about not through peoples volition, but by virtue of the correspondence between the productive relations to the character and level of development of the productive forces. Due to this, the development of society takes the form of the natural historical change of socio-economic formations. Conflict between the productive forces and the relations of production is the economic basis of social revolution.
At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces of society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or ÷ what is but a legal expression for the same thing ÷ with the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution....No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself.
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure – political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas – also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.
We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one.... In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant – the historical event....”
Engels to J. Bloch in Königsberg
So, the mode of material production is the central concept of the theory of the economic practice of the social formation. It is itself a complex structure, doubly articulated by the productive forces connection and the relations of production connection, and containing three elements: the labourer, the means of production (sub-divided into object of labour and instrument of labour), and the non-labourer. The term can also be applied by analogy to any other practice or level, for they are all also doubly articulated, contain a similar set of elements, and produce a specific product
