Tradition
Means of production
Overview
In political philosophy, the means of production are the generally necessary assets and resources that enable a society to engage in production. While the exact resources encompassed may vary, they are widely agreed to include the classical factors of production (land, labor, and capital) as well as the general infrastructure and capital goods necessary to reproduce stable levels of productivity. The term means of production can also refer to the means of production and distribution, which additionally include the logistical distribution and delivery of products, generally through distributors; or the means of production, distribution, and exchange, which further include the exchange of distributed products, generally to consumers.
The concept of the means of production is used by researchers in various fields of study—including politics, economics, and sociology—to discuss, broadly, the relationship between anything that can have productive use, its ownership, and the constituent social parts needed to produce it.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Means of production is discussed.
Now the means of production are labour, implements, and materials. The only productive power which anywhere exists, is the productive power of labour, implements, and materials.
John Stuart Mill, Essays on some unsettled Questions of Political Economy
states what it is; names the idea; opens on it
It is no longer able to turn all this mass of means of production into capital. They lie fallow, and for that very reason the industrial reserve army must also lie fallow. Means of production, means of subsistence, available laborers, all the elements of production and of general wealth, are present in abundance. But "abundance becomes the source of distress and want" (Fourier), because it is the very thing that…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
names the idea
We see then: the means of production and of exchange, on whose foundation the bourgeoisie built itself up, were generated in feudal society. At a certain stage in the development of these means of production and of exchange, the conditions under which feudal society produced and exchanged, the feudal organisation of agriculture and manufacturing industry, in one word, the feudal relations of property became no…
Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto
names the idea; author linked in the graph; opens on it
This expropriation fulfils itself through the play of laws immanent in capitalistic production itself, through the concentration of capital. One capitalist kills many. Hand in hand with this concentration, or the expropriation of many capitalists by a few, there develop continually the conscious technical application of science, the deliberate organised exploitation of the soil, the transformation of the instruments…
Friedrich Engels, Landmarks of Scientific Socialism
names the idea; opens on it
By freedom is meant, under the present bourgeois conditions of production, free trade, free selling and buying. But if selling and buying disappears, free selling and buying disappears also. This talk about free selling and buying, and all the other "brave words" of our bourgeoisie about freedom in general, have a meaning, if any, only in contrast with restricted selling and buying, with the fettered traders of the…
Karl Marx, Manifesto of the Communist Party
states what it is; author linked in the graph
Philosophers who discussed Means of production
- Karl Marx
- B. R. Ambedkar
- Noam Chomsky
- Young Marx
- Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
- Bertrand Russell
- Michel Henry
- Byung-Chul Han
Related ideas
- Productive forces
- Philosophy
- Karl Marx
- Infrastructure
- Sociology
- Marxism
- Surplus product
- Classical economics
- Politics
- Political philosophy
- Knowledge
- Social class
- Relations of production
- Working class
- Social revolution
- Capitalist mode of production
- Marxian economics
- Marxist philosophy
- Proletariat
- A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
- Barcelona
- Australia
- Canada
- Capitalism
Place in the tradition
Part of Anarchism.