I do not believe we can plausibly interpret ‘forces of individuals' in such passages as these to refer simply to the things individuals own – means of production and labour-power - as Cohen's reading would oblige us to. Marx is not speaking here of an external relation of ownership, by people of things (or their own and other people's labouring capacities). On the contrary, when he says a force of production is a force of individuals he clearly intends that force' be understood as a power, an attribute, a characteristic, of those individuals in association - of social individuals - albeit a power which may frequently be materialized in things. The relation is internal.
Marx argues similarly in his later writings. The Grundrisse is insistent that labour is the productive force which maintains and multiplies capital, and which thereby becomes the productive force ... of capital, a force belonging to capital itself (1858a: 274). Importantly, Marx makes clear that by 'labour' here he does not mean labour-power, the commodity which the worker sells the capitalist; the productive force is labour as value-positing activity, as productive labour'(ibid., emphasis added). This distinction between labour-power and labour is not a casual one; it is fundamental to Marx's analysis of capitalism as a whole, and basic, amongst other things, to his mature theory of surplus-value. Cohen, acknowledging the distinction, perversely insists (1978: 43-4) that it is labour-power and not labouring activity which is the productive force. One can see whv, Labour-power can be conceived as athing used in production', as Cohen's theory requires, in a way that labour-as-activity on his own admission cannot. Marx's insistence on the contrary, on the other hand, serves only to underline the gulf between his concept and Cohen's.
Later in the same work Marx argues that all the progress of civilization, or in other words every increase in the powers of social production [gesellschaftliche Produktivkräfte], if you like, in the productive powers of labour itself . . . increases only the productive power of capital ... The productivity of labour becomes the productive force of capital' (ibid.: 308; cf. 715). In an interesting and subtle elaboration of the argument, Marx goes on to say that those who see here a simple ‘displacement' of the productive power of labour to capital, or argue that only labour - as distinct from capital - is productive, only partially escape from the fetish. For they forget that capital' precisely is a social relation, the essence of which is that it subsumes labour and entails the necessary positing of its own powers as alien to the worker'. Such theorists – Marx has in mind Ricardo – do not conceive capital in its specific character as form, as a relation of production reflected into itself, but think only about its material substance, raw material, etc. But these material elements do not make capital into capital’ (ibid.: 308–9). Capital is indeed a productive force, in fine, but it is so by virtue not simply of its ‘material substance', but equally through its particular subsumption or inclusion within itself of labouring activity. It is a productive force, in other words, precisely in its character as a production relation.
One final quotation will suffice to round off the argument. It is taken from Theories of Surplus Value, a text intended by Marx as the fourth volume of Capital, which'dates from the early 1860s. The parallels between fetishism of productive forces and commodity fetishism are here made absolutely explicit:
Since living labour – through the exchange between capital and labourer – is incorporated in capital, and appears as an activity belonging to capital from the moment that the labour-process begins, all the productive powers of social labour appear as the productive powers of capital, just as the general social form of labour appears in money as the property of a thing. Thus the productive power of social labour and its special forms now appear as productive powers and forms of capital, of materialized labour, of the material conditions of labour - which, having assumed this independent form, are personified by the capitalist in relation to living labour. Here we have once more the perversion of the relationship, which we have already, in dealing with money, called fetishism. (1863a: 389)
Marx could scarcely be plainer. The traditional' conception of productive forces defended by Cohen, I submit, splendidly exemplifies this perversion of the relationship'. It illustrates both features of fetishism discussed above: materialization of the social, and consequent universalization of the historical. This conception certainly takes productive forces to be not the productive powers of social labour', but productive powers ... of the material conditions of labour'. Cohen defines productive forcs in terms of the latter, as labouring capacity and means of production, and moreover takes pains to insist that these are material as distinct, quite specifically, from social forces. He then generalizes this concept of productive forces to all modes of production. A misleading and specifically capitalist appearance - for Marx - thereby gets transmuted into a general theoretical postulate, in ways exactly parallel to those Marx himself criticized in his economic predecessors.
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PRODUCTIVE FORCES
PRODUCTIVE FORCES
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