(see also, relations of production)
These are the tools and furnishings with which any society engages in wide scale production. In industrial capitalism the means of production are factories, factory equipment, land, and industrial machinery. The means of production cover two broad categories:
- subjects of labor such as raw materials; the things upon which labor exercises its transformative power, and
- instruments of labor such as industrial machinery, the things through which labor exercises its transformative power.
There are also conditions of labor, which includes productive farmland, without which farm labor cannot be performed, and technical or scientific knowledge, without which certain forms of highly technical or scientific labor cannot be performed.
Instruments of labor excludes most hand tools and artisan’s tools, even though those would once have constituted instruments of labor; this is because hand tools cannot compete with the industrial machinery which forms the backbone of modern commodity production.
Because scientific and technical knowledge are also conditions of labor, the restriction of such knowledge can form a petit-bourgeois class relation: certain highly specialized technical or scientific employment constitutes a petit-bourgeois productive relation.
