productive forces

[u/OkHeart8476]

the first i came across the productive forces concept was in some sort of china context. china argues it can't have truly achieved socialism unless it has developed the productive forces that allow for the transition, etc. it occurs to me that i never came across it before encountering writings on modern china. is this a concept within marxist thought before china did its 'opening up' and everything?

[u/RNagant]

Yes, Marx wrote quite a bit about the "contradiction" between the forces and relations of production, and its a recurring theme across all his economic works. One of the more famous bits comes from the preface to the critique of political-economy:

In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises 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. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of development, the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or – this merely expresses the same thing in legal terms – with the property relations within the framework of which they have operated hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into their fetters. Then begins an era of social revolution. The changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure.

In studying such transformations it is always necessary to distinguish between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, artistic or philosophic – in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as one does not judge an individual by what he thinks about himself, so one cannot judge such a period of transformation by its consciousness, but, on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the conflict existing between the social forces of production and the relations of production. No social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed, and new superior relations of production never replace older ones before the material conditions for their existence have matured within the framework of the old society.

Pertinently, this comes up in Marx and Engel's analysis for how and why capitalism is creating the conditions for its own replacement by communism, which is expounded in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, ch 3. To put it a bit reductively, the idea being that industrialization doesnt just result in increased productivity, but changes the way in which labor is organized, makes it social, and that this social labor would more "neatly" or naturally coincide with socialized appropriation, which it doesnt under capitalism. You can find more on this subject in the writings of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, so yes in a word its a recurring theme in Marxist thought.

With respect to China you'll find some controversy over whether they truly need to keep developing their forces of production (which have already become highly industrial) or whether this is an excuse to keep things as they are. There is certainly some truth in that to transition to a mode of distribution in which one no longer needs to keep an account of consumption ("to each according to their need") you would need to expand productivity to a higher level of abundance, though I dont quite think that's exactly what the CPC has in mind when they say they're still waiting to transition to socialism.

[u/Same-Age7412 → u/RNagant]

China is currently a bourgeois State governed by the interests of the bourgeois class, or rather, the bourgeois class does not need to compete for hegemony as in other capitalist models, as the State is highly conscious of developing the conditions appropriate to the bourgeoisie for the exploitation of the masses. The Chinese people will at some point have to make a second revolution. It turns out that in China the issue is more complex, the means of State control in order to make the regime peaceful are much more powerful than in any other nation, such as the United States for example.