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Means of production
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Means of production (abbreviated MoP; German: Produktionsmittel), are the combination of the means of labor and the subject of labor used by workers to make products. Means of labor include machines, tools, plant and equipment, infrastructure, and so on: "all those things with the aid of which man [sic] acts upon the subject of labor, and transforms it." (Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., 1957, p xiii). Thethose means of production participate in the process of exploiting labor for surplus value.[1]
Means of production is sometimes confused with factors of production. The term factors of production is typically understood as an explanation for income as duly paid to owners of each means of production and also to the workers themselves within capitalism. By comparison, the term means of production applies to these means independent of their ownership and their compensation, and regardless of whether the mode of producing is capitalist, feudal, slave, group labor|communal or otherwise.
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The analysis of people's relationships with the means of production is one element that stands at the basis of Marxism. Karl Marx focused on labor questions. He considered it a reification to treat labor as just another "factor" in production; it implied an inversion of means and ends, so that people were effectively used as things. The working classes are the principal productive forces of society, since their labor creates and conserves material wealth. The bourgeoisie, meanwhile, comprises people who own and trade in means of production as capital assets, and who hire workers to work for them, using those means of production. The bourgeois as property owner can obtain a profit from the work of his employees because the value of output exceeds the outlay on wages and materials. Therefore, the bourgeois obtains a surplus value from the work of his employees. In the Marxist view, this constitutes exploitation of the workers.[citation needed]
Marx's terms are often employed in economic analysis by socialists who advocate public ownership of some or all of the means of production. The affinity between labor movement causes and this advocacy is very strong - and often shared by social democrats, socialists, communists and greens. Marx's analysis in particular helped to make clear the key differences between capital and "labor".
Marxists define economic systems in terms of how the means of production are used, and which social class controls them. Thus, in capitalism, the means of production are controlled by the bourgeoisie, (the "capitalists" - the owners of capital), while in socialism they are controlled by the people's elected representatives and in communism they are controlled collectively by the people themselves.[citation needed]
- ^ Even under these circumstances, capital is not always in the form of means of production, Rather the process or circuit of capital requires capital to change froms from means of production into finished products into money and back into means of production. This particular circuit is called the circuit of productive capital (see Capital vol2 ch1)
Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1957). Political Economy: A Textbook. London: Lawrence and Wishart.