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Productive forces, productive powers, or forces of production (German: Produktivkräfte) is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism.. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' own critique of political economy, it refers to the combination of the means of labor (tools, machinery, land, infrastructure, and so on) with human labour power.
The theory of the productive forces, sometimes referred to as productive force determinism, is a variation of historical materialism and Marxism that places primary emphasis on technical advances as the basis for advances and changes in the social structure and culture of a given civilization. The relative strength assigned to the role of ...
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 23 February 2025. Economic and sociopolitical worldview For the political ideology commonly associated with states governed by communist parties, see Marxism–Leninism. Karl Marx, after whom Marxism is named. Friedrich Engels, who co-developed Marxism. Marxism is a political philosophy and method of ...
Marx never provided a complete definition of the capitalist mode of production as a short summary, although in his manuscripts he sometimes attempted one. In a sense, it is Marx's three-volume work Capital (1867–1894; sometimes known by its German title, Das Kapital), as a whole that provides his "definition" of the capitalist mode of ...
Smith saw the price of a commodity as a reflection of how much labour it can "save" the purchaser. The LTV is central to Marxist theory, which holds that capitalists' expropriation of the surplus value produced by the working class is exploitative. Modern mainstream economics rejects the LTV and uses a theory of value based on subjective ...
Marx argued that, instead, the tendency of the rate of profit to fall is "an expression peculiar to the capitalist mode of production of the progressive development of the social productivity of labor". [40] Marx never denied that profits could contingently fall for all kinds of reasons, [40] but he thought there was also a structural reason ...
Marx based his theory of history on the necessity of labor to ensure physical survival. In The German Ideology , Marx wrote that the first historical act was the production of means to satisfy material needs and that labor is a "fundamental condition of all history, which today, as thousands of years ago, must daily and hourly be fulfilled ...
Behind the MPS was a modernization theory according to which the criterion of progress consisted of the physical quantity of material goods being produced. This system was, paradoxically, strongly influenced by Marx's critique of wealth creation in capitalist society, and his distinction between capitalistically productive and unproductive labour.