Means of production
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Means of production refers to physical, non-human inputs used in production—the factories, machines, and tools used to produce wealth -- along with both infrastructural capital and natural capital. This includes the classical factors of production minus financial capital and minus human capital. They include two broad categories of objects: instruments of labour (tools, factories, infrastructure, etc.) and subjects of labour (natural resources and raw materials). People operate on the subjects of labour, using the instruments of labour, to create a product; or, stated another way, labour acting on the means of production creates a product. When used in the broad sense, the "means of production" includes the "means of distribution" which includes stores, banks, and railroads.
The term can be simply and picturesquely described in an agrarian society as the soil and the shovel; in an industrial society, the mines and the factories.
See also
- Clause IV
- Distributism
- Factors of production
- Information revolution
- gross fixed capital formation
- Mode of production
- Marxism
- Nationalization
- Productive forces
- property
- Private property - Refers to ownership of capital by a business or individual capitalist for profit.
- Privatization
- Relations of production
- Socialism - An economic system based on public ownership of the means of production.
- State Capitalism
