Ingy Higazy
Department of Politics, University of California, Santa Cruz
Production is perhaps one of the most central concepts to political and social critical thought of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The term, according to the Oxford Learner’s Dictionary, is defined as the process by which a thing is made, either naturally or through human intervention. In the latter case, the definition states, it is a process which yields large quantities of a single product from an aggregate of material. Thus, as already implied in the definition, production is specifically crucial to the study of political economy.
Karl Marx’s critique of political economy, and thus, of capitalism, as well as his materialist approach to history, centered on analyzing historical modes of production, with capitalism being the contemporary mode. Production in this case both alludes to an encompassing system and a process. Accordingly, one of Marx’s main premises is that capitalism is a social relation of production. This social relation of production, according to Marx, binds together labor in “a purely atomistic way,” whereby the laborers’ “own relations of production…assume a material shape which is independent of their control” (Marx, Capital, 187). Thus, production is both a social and material relation, where both are intertwined, and the former is expressed in the latter. For Marx, production is distinguished from distribution (Marx, Capital, 172), as well as from circulation (247), to which he dedicates the second volume of Capital (1885).
The capitalist mode of production is characterized by ownership of the means of production, and is thus a bourgeois mode of production (Marx, Capital, 176). What is furthermore specific to the capitalist mode of production, Marx explains in Capital, Vol. I (1867), is the creation of commodities and of value. For Marx, commodities are the products of labor and the basic unit of the capitalist system. Thus, capitalism entails a dialectical social process, between labor and capital (specifically the owners of the means of production), that in turn produces the capitalist system. In fact, for Marx, both labor power and capital are produced, and are thus specific to capitalism (Marx, “Wage Labor and Capital,” 207). In other words, Marx, and Marxian political thinking, approach labor and capital as both producers and products of capitalism. This attentiveness to the inherently social character of labor and capital opened up new avenues in thinking critically about the social world and about capitalism as a social system. The dynamism of such social character is most clearly captured in analyzing and understanding the specificities of the process of production under capitalism. One cannot critically and analytically approach production as a concept, however, without engaging value and the process of value creation, which Marx also theorizes in Capital, Vol. I. In the first chapter to Capital, Marx explains use-value as the product of labor time (Marx, Capital, 129). Marx writes: “[what] exclusively determines the magnitude of the value of any article is therefore the amount of labour socially necessary…for its production” (Marx, Capital, 129). For Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations (1776), as representative of the classical economists Marx critiques in Capital, production also comes in different forms and shapes (Smith, 25). In essence, it is a process that involves a division of labor (Smith, 19), which Marx closely and critically analyzes. Thus, Marx’s critique of capitalism and of the sites of capitalist production entailed a theoretical engagement with the spaces and (spatial) divisions of, or inherent to, production.
Thus, it comes as no surprise that production, as a concept and a process, is central to the study of space and geography. According to Susan Mayhew, in her entry in The Oxford Dictionary of Geography (fifth edition). “Mode of Production,” “each mode of production creates its own geography.” In its turn, the capitalist mode of production creates an uneven geography of development (Mayhew, “Mode of Production”), where discrepancies in levels of capitalist development characterize the global expansion of capital. One of the foremost theorists of capitalism’s uneven geographical development is the British geographer David Harvey, who also authored A Companion to Marx’s Capital (2010). Further, Marx’s theory of production directly influenced a number of other influential thinkers of space and geography, most notably, the French Marxian theorist Henri Lefebvre, author of The Production of Space (1991). Lefebvre theorized that space—both social and material—was a product of capitalism. Failing to analytically capture, and thus explain, space as both an active agent and a product of capitalism, is, according to Lefebvre, failing to capture the capitalist mode of production in all its myriad forms or expressions. It also means losing sight of the dialectical relations of production that begot those expressions in the first place. Thus, production has been a crucial concept in the development of a number of theoretical approaches within the field of geography. Such approaches have both expanded on and used—as well as continue to use—as their analytical tool Marx’s theory of production relayed in Capital.
Prominent thinkers, such as the French philosopher Michel Foucault, also theorized knowledge and truth production as central to the modern enterprise, or, more accurately, as building blocks of capitalist modernity. For Foucault, the production of truth is the function of disciplinary power—the modern form of power that regulates and acts on the body. This kind of power, according to Foucault, is not separate from the development of the capitalist mode of production, as he specifically writes in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975). Therefore, production does not play a role merely in materialist analyses and critiques of capitalism, but also in, broadly defined, social and cultural analyses. Thus, culture and identity, or cultural identities, have also been theorized as direct results of a/the process of production. Culture industries, national identities, and even nation-states have been all conceptualized as products of processes specific to each, as well as products of the capitalist mode of production. In fact, within the discipline of sociology, the concept of the production of culture, developed by sociologist Richard A. Peterson, stipulates that “the content of symbolic elements (or cultural objects) is significantly shaped by the environments within which they are created, distributed, evaluated, taught, preserved, and even consumed” (Santoro, “Production of Culture”). Thus, production, as a concept, has taken on lives of its own—sometimes all together separate from Marx’s initial theorization.
Finally, a number of scholars have expanded on the contributions of Marx, Critical Marxian Geography, and Foucault to stipulate a theory of production. Particularly in the fields of Sociology and Critical Geography have such endeavors been undertaken, and continue to yield new and fresh analyses. One example is Deborah Cowen’s work on logistics’ spaces and the changing (and expanding) sites of production, particularly in The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (2014). Cowen theorizes that production has changed and expanded to include even transportation, an activity previously theorized as belonging to the realm of circulation. This engagement with production in its own right is not a radical departure from Marx himself, who deals more directly with production in the second half of Capital, Vol. I. Cowen’s work is but one example of a theoretically-informed text that directly and critically approaches the concept of production, from within Marxian thinking more generally. While more and more scholars continue to engage Marx’s writings on production, it becomes more pressing to approach the concept with both an historical and a critical eye—in order to account for the myriad ways that it has been previously approached and theorized, as well as the myriad ways in which what it signifies continues to change and to evolve.
Bibliography
Cowen, Deborah. The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade. University of Minnesota Press, 2014.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1995.
Harvey, David. A Companion to Marx’s Capital. Verso, 2010.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell Publishing, 1991.
Marx, Karl. Capital, Vol. I. Vintage Books, 1977.
Mayhew, Susan. “Mode of Production.” In The Oxford Dictionary of Geography, 5th ed. Oxford University Press, 2015.
Peterson, Richard A. “Production of Culture.” In The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, edited by George Ritzer. Blackwell Publishing, 2007.
Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. W. Strahan and T. Cadell, 1776.
Santoro, Marco. “Production of Culture.” In The SAGE Encyclopedia of Economics and Society, edited by Frederick F. Wherry and Juliet B. Schor. Sage Publications, 2015.