Productive Forces, RoP, Historical Progression
[Capitalism] has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked selfinterest, than callous “cash payment”. […] It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade.
It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.
- Productive forces are the steady march of technology which drive economic growth through “good ideas” and efficiency.
- Relations of production are the social institutions that facilitate (or hinder) production—the context within which production occurs → Think: patent systems (transforming ideas into property), protection of proptery, chattle slavery
Direction of History
Our epoch, the epoch of the bourgeoisie, possesses, however, this distinct feature: it has simplified class antagonisms. Society as a whole is more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other—Bourgeoisie and Proletatriat (Marxism).
Feudalistic society i.e. guilds + birth-determined rank → Capitalist Society i.e. private property, wage-labor
→ Productive forces has outgrown capitalism—”specture haunting Europe”
⇒ Constant change in ideas, innovation, striving for growth, and societal thought, idealology changed to serve its mode of production
All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all newformed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.
⇒ BZ RoP destroys national boundaries, cosmopolitan nature of production as it brings together global supply of goods into global consumer demand (ultimately, the “epidemic of overproduction”)
The bourgeoisie has through its exploitation of the world market given a cosmopolitan character to production and consumption in every country.
It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilisation into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
⇒ Ultimately consuming the whole world economy into its RoP
Communism is the necessary form and the dynamic principle of the immediate future, but communism is not as such the goal of human develop ment - the form of human society.9
and communism is thus inevitable:
enough. In order to supersede private property as it actually exists, real communist activity is necessary. History will give rise to such activity, and the movement which we already know in thought to be a self-superseding move ment will in reality undergo a very difficult and protracted process.
because the brotherhood of man is real
The brotherhood of man is not a hollow phrase, it is a reality, and the nobility of man shines forth upon us from their work-worn figures.
[…] in one word, the feudal relations of property became no longer compatible with the already developed productive forces; they became so many fetters. They had to be burst asunder; they were burst asunder.
a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up by his spells.
⇒ When PF outgrows RoP, naturally PF wins; i.e. communism is inevitable. Feudalism to Capitalism, Capitalism to Communism
Currently we observe this as the epidemic of overproduction:
[…] the epidemic of over-production. Society suddenly finds itself put back into a state of momentary barbarism […] And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones.