Material things (land, tools, raw materials, fuel, machines and so forth) only become productive forces in so far as they take on social characteristics. A production line, for instance, is indeed (among other things) a set of material objects, and the natural properties of those objects obviously make up an important part of the explanation of its contribution to the productivity of human labour. But a production line is equally a manifestation or embodiment of both ideas and social relations, and it is only through these that it becomes a production line as distinct from a heap of useless metal. The ideas and social relations, therefore, are quite as intrinsic to the possibility of a production line being a productive force as its more evidently material features. A machine would not be a productive force in a society which lacked the technical knowledge or social organization to utilize its material capacities; at best it might be a potential productive force.
Conversely, social phenomena – forms of co-operation and division of labour, scientific knowledge, the Protestant work ethic', and much else – are not productive forces either, except in so far as they are materialized in actual production processes. In this sense ‘all productive force resolves itself into ‘a given relation to nature' (1858a: 540). They, too, will only be potential productive forces outwith this context, and accordingly fettered' if the requisite conditions for their productive utilization are absent. One frequent argument for socialism, for instance, is that it would unlock the knowledge and enthusiasm of direct producers in a way capitalism, by virtue of its social relations, does not. In short, neither material objects, nor social phenomena, are inherently or universally productive forces by virtue of their innate' properties alone; they become so only by dint of the relations - both between people themselves, and between people and nature - in which they stand. Things, then – contrary to Cohen, and much mainstream Marxism - are not, in or of themselves, productive forces. The concept is inherently a relational, and therefore an historical and contextual, one.
Indeed, an alternative translation of Marx's Produktivkräfte - that of productive powers – is rather more revealing of the sense he gave the term. 'Productive powers’ was in fact the original concept in classical political economy which Marx rendered in German as Produktivkräfte. Whereas a force' can be conceived as a thing, an independent entity, standing alone, a power is always an attribute of something. For Marx, the power in question is specifically that of social labour. The' productive forces – a reifying formulation – are precisely the powers to transform nature (and with it human nature) of social labour. Productive forces are thus an attribute of human beings in association, their collective capacities, not a set of things as such at all. Cohen himself notes that neither an instrument of production nor a quantity of raw material in strict speech is a productive force' (1978: 37); I believe there is more than a slippage of language involved here. As a well-known passage in the Grundrisse hyperbolically puts it:
Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand. (1858a: 706)
The productive power of social labour may indeed, in the course of human development, increasingly become embodied in things – like machines – and undeniably it is through such embodiment that it is most enhanced. This is what is so revolutionary about modern industry; for Marx it represented a qualitative break, a veritable quantum leap in the unfolding of human productive potential comparable only perhaps with the neolithic revolution. Human beings are, distinctively, creatures who purposefully objectify their collective capacities in the material world they create through transforming nature, and this is fundamental to Marx's sociology. In his earlier writings it is this which defines human ‘species-being', while in
26
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
27