Productive Forces

Productive Forces are both means of production, such as machines, etc, goods and raw materials, and workers who operate the means of production and enter the social division of labour. It is self-evident that the means of production and the worker are mutually dependent and, from the capitalist viewpoint, the purpose of applying the worker to the means of production lies in producing commodities which contain surplus value. Productive forces express people’s active relationship with nature—their material and intellectual mastery of it and their development of its riches. It come into conflict with the existing production relations, which are converted from forms promoting the development of the productive forces into fetters impeding their development.