''The term "Theory of Productive Forces" should not be confused with the Marxist analysis of productive forces that is a cornerstone of Marxist theory.

The Theory of Productive Forces (sometimes referred to pejoratively by opponents as productive force determinism) is a widely-used concept in communism and Marxism placing primary emphasis on achieving abundance in a nominally socialist economy before real communism, or even real socialism, can have a hope of being achieved.

The concept has operated in all examples of state-supervised socialism to date, particularly the views of Joseph Stalin and Gerald Cohen. According to this view, technical change can beget social change; in other words, changes in the means (and intensity) of production causes changes in the relations of production, (i.e. in people's ideology and culture, their interactions with one another, and their social relationship to the wider world).

In this view, actual socialism or communism, being based on the "redistribution of wealth" to the most oppressed sectors of society, cannot come to pass until that society's wealth is built up enough to satisfy whole populations. Using this theory as a basis for their practical programmes meant that communist theoreticians and leaders, while paying lip service to the primacy of ideological change in individuals to sustain a communist society, actually put productive forces first, and ideological change second.

The Theory of Productive Forces is behind Stalin's Five Year Plans, Mao Tse-Tung's Great Leap Forward, and most other examples of attempts to build and refine communism throughout the world in the 20th Century, although Maoism's subsequent concept of the need for a Cultural Revolution did signal some limited steps away from reliance on the theory. The philosophical perspective behind the modernizing zeal of, in particular, the Russian and Chinese communists seeking to industrialise their countries is perhaps captured best by this thought in The German Ideology by Marx and Engels.

Marx's View on Productive Forces

It is doubtful whether productive-force determinism was an analysis held by Marx himself. Marx saw social change in history as emerging essentially from the dyssynchrony between productive forces and relations of production, and who emphasized living human subjects as the central productive force (subjects who also actively produced and reproduced their social relations). In his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx wrote:

Marx does not, as Stalin claimed, state here that "First the productive forces of society change and develop, and then, depending on these changes and in conformity with them, men's relations of production, their economic relations, change." Instead, Marx argues that "these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc." He does not say that productive forces linearly determine social relations; rather he says social relations are "closely bound up" with productive forces. It is through changing their "mode of production" or their way of "earning a living" that social relations are changed. This suggests a more complex causal relationship between productive forces and social relations exists than Stalin suggested. Possibly Stalin's interpretation owed more to the project of modernising the USSR with a strong emphasis on heavy industry as the basis for growth.

As Chris Harman notes about the Marx passage above, however, in truth Marx's sweeping generalisation does not hold water. "summation," he writes, "is crude. It is also historically inaccurate. What accompanied the rise of European feudalism after the 10th century was not the spread of the handmill, but its replacement over the centuries, the watermill--and the watermill then went on to play an important role in the genesis of industrial capitalism." [http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/isj102/harman.htm 3 | Communism | Marxism | Maoism | Economics | Economic theories | Political theories | Politics