modes of production

in this talk I'm going to be looking at what a motor production is in Marxist theory the fundamental thesis of Marxism is that in the social production of their existence men inevitably enter into definite relations independent that there will name the relations of production appropriate to the given stage of the development of material forces of the production the totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society the real foundation on which arise a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social political and intellectual life this is an 1857 before Marx wrote capital here he's talking about the mode of production of material life emphasis on material here if you then go on much later and here I'm taking stone as an example but you could get much the same formulation in the alte Syrian school and many post-1960 Western Marxists Stalin says the productive forces are only one aspect of production only one aspect of the mode of production an aspect that expresses the relation of men to the objects and forces of nature which they make use of for the production of material values another aspect of production another aspect of the mode of production is the relation of men to each other in the process of production and men's relations of production this seems pretty similar but it's not quite the same here he's saying that the mode of production is productive forces plus production relations that becomes even more explicit in the Algerian school is this the same as Marx no I think it's an oversimplification and the important over simplify is that in many places and I think in the predominant where he uses it when Marx talks about the mode of production he's talking about the mode of material production and this is a lot of relevance to the debates which occur about whether or not the USSR had a socialist mode of production for example because you have to ask what would associate motor production actually be does it make any sense to talk of a socialist mode of production the first use of the term mode of production in capital is the following the mode of production in which the product takes the form of a commodity or is produced directly for exchange is the most general and embryonic form of bushwa production it therefore makes its appearance at an early date in history they're not in the same predominating and characteristic manner as nowadays yet he's just using the term mode of production to simply mean any system of commodity production dating to early in history and he's not making any reference to the mode of material production here but later on it shifts another passage says the reader will bear in mind that the production of surplus-value or the extraction of surplus labor is the specific end and aim than sum and substance of capitalist production quite apart from any changes in the mode of production which may arise from the subordination of labor to capital Jiri distinguishes between capitalist production and the mode of production the mode of production now refers to the actual labor process the mode of production is something distinct from the extraction of surplus value and the mode of production is changed as a result of capitalist production so capitalist production comes first and later creates the capitalist mode of production which implies that you can have capitalism without a capitalist mode of production the capitalist mode of production is a later historical phase at first capital subordinates labor on the basis of the technical conditions in which it historically finds it it does not therefore immediately change the mode of production so here he is saying that the subordination of labor to capital is not equivalent to the catalyst mode of production people think the capitalist mode of production is the same as exploitation of wage labor Marx says the exploitation of wage labor precedes the capitalist mode of production so what then is the capitalist mode of production the capitalist mode of production is machine industry the passion of capital for an unlimited and reckless extension of the working-day is first gratified in the industry's earliest revolutionized by water power steam and machinery in those first creations of the modern mode of production cotton wool flax and silk spinning and weaving the changes in the material mode of production and the corresponding changes in the social relations of the producers give first to an extravagance beyond all bounds so he's quite explicit here that the modern mode of production is what he what we know as the factory system powered factory machinery this is what is the change in the material mode of production that is associated with capitalism that comes as a consequence of capitalism and creates the capitalist mode of production capitalist mode of production is the factory system the system of powered machinery carrying out production supervised by workers the point to emphasize is that capital actually revolutionizes the motor production mark says that hitherto in treating of surplus-value arising from a simple prolongation of the working-day we have assumed that the mode of production is given an invariable but when surplus value has to be produced by the conversion of necessary labour into surplus labour it no longer suffice is for capital to take over the labour process in the form under which it has been historically handed down and then simply prolong the duration the technical and social conditions of the process and consequently the very motive production must be revolutionized therefore the productiveness of labour can be increased so here he clearly means by the very mode of production the actual mode of material production so there's a sequence of uses of the phrase first production of commodities then extraction of surplus value then he talks about manufacturing and the division of labour and then he talks about machine industry which is a specifically capitalist mode of production but this then raises a problem what's the social smarter production if machine Industries is specifically capitalist mode of production what is the surface mode doesn't socialism base itself on machine interest is to so his machine industry the mode of production of both capitalism and socialism now one possible way of looking at it and still arriving at the idea that something's unique about socialism in terms of the mode of production is the emphasis of the communists have placed on electrification Lenin famously said that communism of Soviet power plus electrification capitalism went from water to win and wind power to steam the Communists from the beginning have been in favor of using electricity in the 1890s Liebknecht wrote about having met Marx in the 1850s just after Marx had seen a model electric chain Mark's enthusiam the justice team and created capitalism electric power would create a new economic and social order it's probable that the electric train he saw was an early Siemens demonstration train which I have a photo here it wasn't yet practical for industrial use but it demonstrated that electrical vehicles were possible there's a sequence of sources of power used by modes of production slavery used muscle power feudalism used muscle power but also a lot of water power there were literally thousands of water mills recorded in the Domesday book in 1086 in Britain thousands of them around 3,000 the innovation of industrial capitalism with the use of steam power water powers already well established in the fuel economy and Marx thought that electrical power would bring a bring about or be associated with socialism so we have to ask why electricity leave Nick was very skeptical about Marx says statements about electricity writing in the 1890s he said what uses out trust him into us basically it's had no impact on the economy now Marx was obviously right electricity has had a huge impact been very widely used but we have to say why was L Tracy Cena so crucial that Lenin singled it out as the very key to Soviet industrialization why is it so important let's look at the different forms of power starting with muscle power human power is an Universal abstract productive capacity this is what is meant by abstract labour we can apply our skills to any productive activity and use our muscles to that purpose our energy output is modest it's perhaps 100 watts but it can be applied in any trade or profession the first alternative to human effort was that of our brute servants the oxen the horse strong as these companions are their skills are limited they helped us draw vehicles or pull plows but they couldn't help us cruise ships lay bricks or to spin next came steam steam went to sea with us supplanting half a crew replaced our beasts in traction turn mills cut stones for our cities but she was heavy inflexible and produced only motive force she could not sing wash or sea for us with electricity we harness for the first time a power that rivaled that of human labour and flexibility whilst vastly surpassing it in magnitude electricity wrote for us then spoke for us thence offer us in Telegraph's telephones and television its motors range in size and power from our little fingers to that of 50,000 horses it lights our darkness heats our homes stores our records reasons and calculates it is power in the abstract the general watt electricity requires the establishment of national electricity grids this in turn requires planning it also requires an effective monopoly since you can't have two different systems of delivering power to house this in turn implies either state regulated capitalism or public ownership of electricity supply I think this is another reason for Lenin's enthusiasm he saw it as an inherently socialist form of the distribution of energy which could only by some distortion become a capitalist one he saw planned electric power as the basis of socialism and even if you look in the 1960s program of the CPSU written by Khrushchev again they lay great emphasis on electric power as the foundation of communism now any mode of production has to tap into energy sources and the successive modes of material production have tapped into greater energy resources consider the first big transition the transition from a hunter-gatherer society to an agricultural society now this involves a shift of trophic levels in ecological network the concept of a trophic level is that level one is plants level two is herbivores and level three is carnivores and any ecosystem you have these levels and as you move up the levels less and less energy is available so that ten times as much energy is available directly in the form of plants as there is in the form of is as is available to herbivores and then that is cut down by a factor ten again when you look at the carnivores so each of these successive layers represents less biomass and a smaller energy flux now on the right hand side here I show wolves deer trees left-hand-side corn goats humans as humans move down the trophic level moving from hunting to herding to agriculture the energy flux available to them increased probably a couple of orders of magnitude now if we look at the specifically capitalist mode of production which is machine industry this is the form which produces relative surplus-value that is to say surplus value produced by reducing the labor time required to produce the real wage if less time is required to produce the real wage a larger part of the working day is surplus this is what Marx called the real not formal subordination of labor to capital the real subordination of labor to capital comes about through the use of machinery a formal subordination of labor capital the capital existed prior to the use of machinery when people workers merely lacked the raw materials and were exploited under something like the putting out system but this reduction in labor input was only possible by tapping non-biological energy sources the specifically capitalist mode of production depended initially on water than coal and oil so you cannot separate out energy sources from the mode of production and when you look at the evolution of modes of production over time you have to look at the time span which something is going to be viable the hitherto existing industrial mode of production and variants of that have been seen in both historical capitalism and socialism depends on sunlight that has been sequestered in fossil form any mode of production like that is self-limiting destroying its own conditions of existence and this limitation of the motor production is in a sense at a lower level than the limitation caused by the falling rate of profit it depends on resources which by the scale of human history will be quickly exhausted and it is this that marks out the motor production as ultimately transitory now this is not to say that forms of machine production machine based production or artificial energy based production aren't possible in the future but they're not going to be ones based on fossil fuel they're going to use either nuclear fission solar fuel or nuclear fusion and if we look at all of these new forms of energy these new energy sources were historically relatively new energy sources you see all of them have depended on the state in some cases explicitly on socialist States for their development in both the west and the east nuclear power was initially a state enterprise a state project we can see how the privatization of electricity supply and Britain resolved in a situation where Britain is no longer able to produce its own nuclear reactors twenty or thirty years after privatisation what does the state have to do when it decides that for strategic reasons it does need nuclear power it has to turn to two countries which still have state electricity to supply them France and China so the British Conservative government ends up dependent on the People's Republic of China to build its nuclear reactors when we look at solar power the rapid development of solar power came first through the German government intervening to encourage it but then much more significantly due to the policies of the Chinese government of differentiating its supply and having a planned shift towards the introduction of solar power so that they now interesting solar power plant at the order of 50 Giga watts capacity each year and it is the conscious plan to drive down through mass production the cost of solar power that is having a worldwide impact and making the cost of solar power become competitive with coal fire and this is a result of conscious planning by this Chinese state if we look at the longer-term source of nuclear power its nuclear fusion and that relies on the tokamak design originally invented by a Sakharov back in the 50s and which is basically taking a 70 year development period from the first prototypes to the point where a power reactor is likely to be put into action and that power reactor the ITER reactor in France Kim as one of the last international initiatives of the USSR to create an international consortium to build the tokamak to build the tokamak power reactor the world is now entering the terminal crisis of the motor production based on fossil fueled machine production the whole geopolitical system of gaze world rests on this mode of material production from its stems the ever-growing rivalry to control the world's remaining oil reserves the hegemonic power the USA has social relations which are preventing it replacing fossil fuel as its base the second main economy China because it as a mixed capitalist and socialist ownership potentially can transcend so fossil fuel production and move to an on fossil fuel base and this is setting the stage for the great conflict between modes of production in the coming period

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 9,512

Rating: 4.9290781 out of 5

Keywords: Marxism, Mode of Production, Technology, Steam engines

Id: HbjZlKqDCMA

Length: 21min 22sec (1282 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 22 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/nearlyoctober]

Crude materialism. The emphasis he says at 1:00 to place on "material" evolves into a tirade against dialectics. Yes it's true that capitalist relations emerged in an embryonic form before the mode of production proper, but that doesn't mean that machinery is the mode of production. Machinery isn't important because it is the capitalist mode of production, it's important because it reproduces capitalist relations.