1868, Marx dismissively observes that ‘every child knows'that social labour must be distributed in definite proportions between different branches of production whatever the society. Obviously some proportionality of inputs and outputs must be secured if production is to go on, irrespective of its mode. Such natural laws' cannot be done away with. But what can change is ‘the form in which these laws operate' (1868). Such social forms, for Marx, are the proper subjectmatter of economic science. The ‘material side, which the most diverse epochs of production may have in common' is something ‘whose examination . . . lies beyond political economy' (1858a: 881). He frequently criticizes political economists for their crude materialism' (1858a: 687; cf. 1865a: 323) in failing to differentiate these levels of analysis, leading to the conflation of historical and transhistorical As we shall see below, this is fundamental to his critique of fetishism.
Analysis of what pertains to production in general, then, is for Marx economically antediluvian, an enterprise yielding commonplaces' which at best had a historical value in the first beginnings of the science, when the social forms of bourgeois production had still laboriously to be peeled out of the material, and, at great effort, to be established as independent objects of study'(1858a: 881). One consistent theme in Marx's comments on production in general nevertheless does deserve emphasis here. Though similarly tautological and self-evident to Marx himself, it above all else distinguishes his approach from that of most mainstream economics. This is his insistence on the irreducibly social nature of production – the point brought out by Colletti above.
In The German Ideology Marx stresses that the production of life . . . appears as a double relationship: on the one hand as a natural, on the other as a social relationship' (1846a: 41, emphasis added). Wage Labour and Capital elaborates on this:
In production, men enter into relation not only with nature. They produce only by cooperating in a certain way and mutually exchanging their activities. In order to produce, they enter into definite connections and relations with one another, and only within these social connections and relations does their relation with nature, does production, take place. (1847b: 211)
The same point is basic to Marx's polemic in the General Introduction to the Grundrisse against the unimaginative conceits of the eighteenth-century Robinsonades', the isolated hunters and fishermen who provide the analytic starting-point for the classical economists' systems. Production by an isolated individual outside society ... is as much of an absurdity as is the development of language without individuals living together and talking to each other' (1857: 84). Other texts, early and late, concur (including in the linguistic analogy).9 This sociological emphasis is encapsulated in the nearest Marx comes to a general definition of production as such, again from the General Introduction: ‘All production is appropriation of nature on the part of an individual within and through a definite form of society' (ibid.: 87, emphasis added). Conversely, as argued in the Grundrisse, when we consider .. . society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations' (1858a: 712). To produce material goods in a particular way is ipso facto to participate in the (equally particular) social relations involved in doing so.
Marx's claim here, it should be stressed, is not that social relations are caused by material production but that it irreducibly involves them. They are part and parcel of it. It accordingly cannot be conceptualized, in any empirically adequate manner, independently of them. In particular, production cannot be conceived as a purely material' sphere, if material is taken to exclude social. I shall argue in chapter 3 that this vitiates Cohen's attempted distinction between material’ and ‘social' relations of production as substantially distinct kinds of relation. In Ollman's terminology, the connection between people's productive relations with nature, or labour process, and their productive relations between themselves, or social relations of production, is internal and necessary, not external and contingent. In any given empirical context (a particular, historical form of) the one entails (a particular, historical form of) the other.10 These are but different ‘sides' of one and the same set of relations, not substantially separable relations at all.
IV
I shall now try to show, with reference to productive forces, that this holds equally for any individual components of production. They cannot be conceived as exclusively material either. As production is in general for Marx a double relationship, so productive forces - consistently enough - are also in his usage double', simultaneously natural (material) and social. By this I mean two things. First, both material and social phenomena - in so far as we may coherently distinguish them thus at all when dealing with human productive activities - may become productive forces. Marx talks routinely of ‘every . , , natural or social power of labour' (1858a: 358). Whether or not they do, as in general with Marx and argued above, depends on historical context. Second, and rather more subtly, the material/social distinction is highly problematic here, and real forces of production for Marx habitually partake of both sets of attributes.
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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