From the standpoint of classical political economy, Adam Smith and Friedrich List undeniably influence Marx’s conception of labour as a productive force. On the whole, the complex and multidimensional meaning of a productive force in Marx might be attributed to the fact that, in its dialectical relationship with a relation of production, it constitutes a purely social power that simultaneously arises from labour and is that through which labour actualises itself. This accounts for why, to take another example, Marx and Engels insist that the mode of social cooperation amongst individuals in the production of their means of life ‘is itself a “productive force”.’<sup>77</sup> At the same time, the dialectic between the forces and relations of production cannot be collapsed, if indeed, as Marx and Engels repeatedly state in The German Ideology, existing relations of production become ‘fetters’ to the expansion of productive forces, such that this ongoing conflict gives direction to history. What, if any, temporality can be gleaned from this, and what relation does this temporality have to the social production of the means of life (the temporality of the first historical act)? These questions are, at a transhistorical level, difficult, if not impossible, to answer, not simply because the temporality of a relation of production is only intelligible at the level of different modes of production (the temporal relation between the worker and the capitalist is, of course, not the same as that between the feudal serf and his lord), but also because the significance of the expansion of productive forces is not something which is unto itselftemporally intelligible (unless, that is, one is satisfied, as Marx often seems to be, with the historicist framework of linear, progressive time being the implicit framework for our understanding of this expansion<sup>78</sup>). Even if, for Marx, a ‘force’ is a more ontologically expansive category than a ‘means’, such that forces are ontologically basic to means, it is the creation of the means of life, expressing as it does the temporality inherent in an act, that must anchor our (provisional) temporal understanding of history. There is no reason to suggest that the dialectic of the forces and relations of production could not be rendered as reinforcing the temporality of the dialectic of the present and the past previously analysed, thereby reinforcing the relative priority of the historical present over the historical past (the dialectic of the forces and relations of production is internal to the historical present), but this is something that can only be done at the level of a specific mode of production (this is not our current task<sup>79</sup>).
Justice as the Charity of the Wise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 272. Marx expresses his admiration for Leibniz in a letter to Engels on 10 May 1870. See Marx and Engels, MEW, Band 32 (Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1974), 504.
<sup>77</sup> Marx and Engels, GI, 50.
<sup>78</sup> Even if one tacitly accepts the historicist model of linear, progressive time, does the materialist concept of history not dictate that there is no historical temporality when there is no expansion of productive forces, that it is possible that stretches of chronological time can become ‘stagnant’ to the extent that they are void of historical time, outside of history itself?
<sup>79</sup> Chapter 4 investigates in more detail the essential correspondence between the creation of new needs and the expansion of productive forces.
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