(ii) Productive Forces and the Relations of Production

The activity of production involves first and foremost the making of tools or the development of technology whether we think of the manufacture of spears for hunting or computers for programming. This technology includes not only the tools or machines themselves but all the raw material, technical skills and know-how which go into making and using them and it is described in Marxist theory as a force of production. It is obvious that every time a fresh invention is made, these forces of production change accordingly.

Tools whether simple or sophisticated have to be operated by people and since people must enter into a definite set of relationships in order to produce, the “forces of production” are necessarily linked to the “relations of production." Since the way in which we relate to one another or cooperate in production depends upon the kind of technology we are actually using, we may say therefore that

the relations of production into which people enter are determined by the forces of production which they have created.

As Marx puts it,

social relations are closely bound up with productive forces . . . The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam mill, society with the industrial capitalist.[1]

Thus, for example, in hunting societies in the stage of “primitive communism," everyone works together as a team and there is insufficient wealth produced to allow some to sit idly by while others do the work for them. The collective way in which people work together determines the collective or communal way in which they share out and own the wealth they produce. Productive forces determine the relations of production.

What happens when these productive forces change so that hunting gives way to agriculture and some individuals can accumulate, by fair means or foul, more wealth than they actually need? The relations of production must also change for, to put it simply, a herd of cattle can be owned privately in the way that a herd of buffalo can not. It is now profitable to systematically plunder your neighbors, make them work for you as slaves, and develop private property in crops and cattle. A clan or tribal society owning the means of production in common is gradually transformed into a society divided into classes: the wealth produced by one group is owned by another and although the development of class antagonisms and exploitation had not developed to any significant degree in much of pre-colonial Africa, the changing relations of production can ultimately be explained by changes taking place in the productive forces. Every change in these forces — whether we think of the invention of the plough to till the land or the spinning jenny which mechanised the weaving loom — must transform production relations.

Indeed, it is the dramatic change in the forces of production brought about by capitalism so that thousands of people work together in mines and factories using highly advanced technology, which makes it not merely possible but ultimately necessary for private ownership to give way to social ownership and in conditions of growing abundance for everyone to at once take part in production and yet at the same time enjoy a life of security and freedom. A socialist and communist society cannot how ever simply come about because people “want” it: new forces of production alone make it possible. This is why it would be naive and utopian to try to establish socialist relations of production — where the means of production are owned in common—in a society where most people were still individual handicraft producers or peas ant farmers working small plots of land in isolation from one another. The relations of production must, in Marx's words, be “appropriate to a given stage in the development of their forces of production."[2]

It is only on the basis of developed industry and cooperative and collective agriculture that socialism can be built, and since most African countries who have recently freed themselves from imperialist and neocolonial control suffer from serious technological backwardness, they need to pursue policies of non-capitalist development in order to create the forces of production necessary to sustain socialist relations of production. In South Africa itself, however, things are rather different and following the national democratic revolution, the mechanized agriculture and developed industrial base (already created by the capitalists) would make it possible to build social ism much more rapidly.

Although, as we have seen, the forces of production in any society determine the relations of production and changes in the relations are only possible because of changes in the productive forces, it should not be thought that these changes occur smoothly and automatically. In fact, the very opposite is true particularly when we are speaking of societies divided into antagonistic classes. Here not only do the relations of production “lag behind” changes in technology, but the production relations actively resist the need to adapt and change, they become obsolete and outmoded and enormous pressure has to build up in society before the transformation of production relations can take place and they are brought into line with the altered production forces. In fact it is precisely this pressure which builds up to force old production relations to adapt to the new forces of production that is the real cause of every social and political revolution.

In Marx's words,

at a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production . . . from forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution.[3]

Thus we can now formulate the basic propositions of the materialist theory of history by saying

(a) every alteration in the way a society produces (its forces of production) brings about a change in the way people cooperate in production (the production relations) and because changes in technology are natural and unavoidable in all societies, we can describe the need for the relations of production to adapt to the forces of production as the most basic law of human history — the real explanation for all social change. But

(b) because the development of exploitation, class divisions and the institution of private property arises at a particular stage in history, the adaption of the relations to the forces of production cannot take place “gradually” and “continuously." A revolution is needed in order to take power out of the hands of one class and vest it in another in order to make it possible for the relations and forces of production to once again correspond.

To understand more clearly why it is that class divisions have the effect of obstructing the adjustment of productive relations to productive forces, it is now necessary to introduce into the theory, the concepts of [...click "Next"]