Means of production

Not to be confused with Mode of production.

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Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth^[1] — along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital. They include two broad categories of objects: instruments of labour (tools, factories, infrastructure, etc.) and subjects of labour (natural resources and raw materials). People operate on the subjects of labour, using the instruments of labour, to create a product; or, stated another way, labour acting on the means of production creates a product.^[2] When used in the broad sense, the "means of production" includes the "means of distribution" which includes stores, banks, and railroads.^[3]

The term can be simply and picturesquely described in an agrarian society as the soil and the shovel; in an industrial society, the mines and the factories.

Related terms

Factors of production are defined by Karl Marx in Das Kapital as labour, subjects of labour, and instruments of labour; i.e., the term is equivalent to means of production plus labour. The factors of production are often listed in economic writings derived from the classical school as "land, labour and capital". Marx sometimes used the term "productive forces" equivalently with "factors of production;" in Capital, he uses "factors of production," in his famous Preface to the Critique of Political Economy, he uses "productive forces" (note that this is in the English versions and may depend on the translation.)

Production relations (Marx: Produktionsverhältnis) are the relations humans enter into with each other in using the means of production to produce. Examples of such relations are employer/employee, buyer/seller, the technical division of labour in a factory, and property relations.

Mode of production (Marx: Produktionsweise)

(In political context) - the facilities and resources for producing goods. Study of how people take over other governments using force and violence, not talks and agreements.

Marxist analysis of ownership of MoP within capitalism

The analysis of people's relationships with the means of production is one element that stands at the basis of Marxism. Marx argued that, while in pre-capitalist societies it is clearly the labourer that uses the means of production to create product; in capitalism, whose nature as a mode of production is embodied in its drive to reproduce and increase capital, it is more realistic to say that the means of production uses the labourer.^[4]

The idea of factors of production is typically used as an explanation for income as duly paid to owners of each means of production and also to the workers themselves within capitalism. By comparison, the term means of production applies to these means independent of their ownership and their compensation, and regardless of whether the mode of production is capitalist, feudal, slave, communal, or otherwise.

To the question of why classes exist in human societies in the first place, Karl Marx offered an historical explanation that it was the cultural practice of Ownership of the Means of Production that gives rise to them. This explanation differs dramatically from other explanations based on "differences in ability" between individuals or on religious or political affiliations giving rise to castes. This explanation is consistent with the bulk of Marxist theory in which Politics and Religion are seen as mere outgrowths (superstructures) of the basic underlying economic reality of a people^{[citation needed]}. To remain consistent with these principles, an explanation as to why classes exist in a society must be derived from causes that are essentially economic in nature, and must appeal to the alleged underlying reality of material production.

There are two subtle but important points to the Ownership of the Means of Production. The first being that owning the Means of Production is not the same thing as owning physical property, nor is it equal to owning money. Rather OMP refers to a cultural practice in which a few individuals within a larger corporation (or company) control and decide what is done with the entire profit created by that corporation^{[original research?]}.

The conclusion ultimately reached is that while the "owners" of a corporation only contribute a tiny fraction of the total labor and time in creating profit, they have complete control over that profit and how it is used^{[citation needed]}. The practice of OMP in human societies is then a type of game where some people are labeled owners (Marx used the term, Bourgeoisie) and other people are labeled workers (Marx used the term, Proletariat). The bourgeoisie have complete control over both how the proletariat are paid in wages and complete control over how the profit from production is used, thus giving rise to a class division.

Contrarian interpretations of this practice might state that wages paid to workers are subsumed under the regular costs of maintaining business. However, Marx considered it a reification to treat labor as just another "factor" in production; it implied an inversion of means and ends, so that people were effectively used as things^{[citation needed]}.

Marx's terms are often employed in economic analysis by socialists who advocate public ownership of some or all of the means of production. The affinity between labor movement causes and this advocacy is very strong - and often shared by social democrats, socialists, communists and greens^{[citation needed]}. Marxists define economic systems in terms of how the means of production are used, and which social class controls them. Thus, in capitalism, the means of production are controlled by the bourgeoisie, (the "capitalists" - the owners of capital). In the pure ideal of upper-stage socialism (see: Pure communism), such as that "communism" was/is supposed to be, the MoP are controlled by the workers production cooperative associations directly. In fact this situation has only been historically realized temporarily such as in the Israeli kibbutz or the early Soviets before the entrenchment of the communist party as a "New Class", or in isolated or preliminary form such as in the final phase of the Second Spanish Republic, or various experimental utopian communities^{[original research?]}; although in embryonic form^{[citation needed]}.

See also

• Clause IV
• Distributism
• Factors of production
• Information revolution
• gross fixed capital formation
• Mode of production
• Marxism
• Nationalization
• Productive forces
• property
• Private property
• Privatization
• Relations of production
• Socialization (economics)

References

Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1957). Political Economy: A Textbook. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Footnotes

1. ^ James M. Henslin (2002). Essentials of Sociology. Taylor & Francis US. p. 159. http://books.google.com/books?id=852vjh_IwusC&pg=PA159. 
2. ^ Michael Evans, Karl Marx, London, England, 1975. Part II, Chap. 2, sect. a; page 63.
3. ^ Flower, B.O. The Arena, Volume 37. The Arena Pub. Co, originally from Princeton University. p. 9
4. ^ Even under these circumstances, capital is not always in the form of means of production, rather the process or circuit of capital requires capital to change from means of production into finished products into money and back into means of production. This particular circuit is called the circuit of productive capital (see Capital vol2 ch1)