But what is beyond any doubt, throughout the analysis, is that technological change as such is not the primum agens in the rise of capitalism, or even in the development of the production process most appropriate to it, machine industry. It may be capitalism's most productively revolutionary consequence, but that is a different issue. It is in fact competition between capitals – explained by the division of labour between them, a social relation - which compels technical innovation, and the labour/capital relation that makes its general adoption possible on the basis of co-operative labour. Social relations, not productive forces as conventionally construed, thus have explanatory primacy. ‘Capital is productive, i.e. an essential relation for the development of the social productive forces' - these being the productive powers of labour, which [it] incessantly whips onward with its unlimited mania for wealth' (1858a: 325, emphasis added). The ‘sixth chapter’ is clear that formal subsumption of labour - a change in social relations alone – is not merely historically antecedent to, but forms the premiss and precondition of its real subsumption’ (1866: 1026). Capital, again, reiterates the point. It is the production of relative surplus-value – on the basis of real subordination – which revolutionizes out and out the technical processes of labour'; but this ‘presupposes a specific mode, the capitalist mode of production, a mode which, along with its methods, means and conditions, arises and develops itself spontaneously on the foundation offered by the formal subjection of labour to capital' (1867a: 510).
How, then, are we to reconcile this historical analysis with the picture usually drawn from the 1859 Preface, in which the development of productive forces – understood technologically, as the things used in production (including labour-power) – is the ultimate motor force of historical change, impelling transition from one mode to another? At first sight, Marx's analysis - an analysis, it should again be recalled, of the rise of that mode of production whose laws of motion' preoccupied him above all others - flatly contradicts this picture. Here, changes in production relations bring about developments in technology, not the other way about. A perusal of part 8 of Capital I, incidentally, would complicate the issue still further, since it would additionally reveal the key part played in Marx's account by those historically 'favourable circumstances' of the sixteenth century to which he refers in the ‘sixth chapter'. It is difficult to see how for instance Henry VII's dissolution of the monasteries is readily susceptible to technological explanation, no matter how ‘ultimate'.
Marx's account is in fact (logically) compatible with Cohen's functionalist reading of the primacy thesis', to which I shall return. It evidently cannot, however, be reconciled with standard causal versions of that claim. In the face of this Anderson (1974a: 204 ff.), Bettelheim (1976: 86ff.), Balibar (in Althusser, 1970: 233ff.) and others have sought to reverse the traditional paradigm, arguing instead for the dominance of relations over forces. Whilst I sympathize with what they are attempting, I believe the problem to be illusory. I also think this solution misleading, for several reasons. First, it bends the stick too far; as I shall show, there is a sense in which Marx's analysis here is compatible with the primacy thesis', though that sense is not Cohen's. But simply to reverse the line of causality between forces and relations obscures the important extent to which, for Marx, the growth of human productive power does remain the fundamental dynamic of historical progress. Second - although the authors I have cited are not in fact themselves generally guilty of this – a mere reversal of terms may have the consequence of preserving a conception of productive forces as things which was not Marx's own, and which is, as I shall argue below, specifically fetishistic. Finally, this way out of the dilemma entails dismissing the claims of the 1859 Preface as anomalous, which is to say the least implausible.
In fact, Marx's analysis of the rise of capitalist productive forces contradicts the claims of the 1859 Preface only so long as productive forces are understood in the traditional, restrictive manner. So soon as the forms of co-operation and division of labour entailed in the formal subsumption of labour to capital (or, indeed, the competitive relations between individual capitals) are themselves acknowledged to be productive forces in this historical context, the apparent inconsistency disappears. The rise of capitalism is indeed understood in terms of new productive forces conflicting with old production relations, exactly as the Preface requires. Only in this case - in the first instance, at any rate – the new forces at issue are embodied in new forms of social relationship rather than new technologies. Such an interpretation is of course consistent with the passages cited above from The German Ideology and elsewhere, which indicate that for
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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