FORCES AND RELATIONS OF PRODUCTION (CAPITALISM, CO-OPERATION, WORK, MARXISM, NATURE)

My research problem consists of identifying the sources of confusion and controversy over the meaning of the concepts of production forces (i.e., people-nature relations) and production relations (i.e., people-people relations) in historical materialism, assessing the strengths and weaknesses of existing interpretations, and reconstructing these concepts in light of new sociological knowledge and changing historical conditions. At the center of this study is my effort to clarify the especially notable confusion over the exact theoretical status of relations among producers in material production (i.e., the mode of cooperation). Are such relations given by science and technology and therefore a production force? Alternatively, are they organized to control and exploit labor and therefore a species of social production relations? Or is mode of cooperation simultaneously a production force and production relation?;Two methodologies are employed in this study. First, historical and comparative techniques of analysis are used to decode previous conceptualizations of forces and relations of production and related concepts in terms of the historical circumstances in which they were produced. The second is a deductive mode of theory construction used in reconstructing forces and relations of production, and their articulation, in a model of the capitalist mode of production. However, I also distinguish between such a theory of the conditions of capital and a theory of capital historically and therefore interpretively understood.;To summarize my findings: methodological and theoretical clarity requires that production forces be redefined to include social relationships. Productive forces are not only "forces of social production" in the sense that they are a vehicle for appropriating nature underlying society. They are also "social or capitalist and cultural-ideological production forces." To grasp relations in material production as simultaneously a force and relation of production I distinguish mode of industrial cooperation (i.e., a means to the end of the appropriation of nature) and industrial capitalist mode of cooperation (i.e., the social form in which work relations are imposed on producers). As production relations are conceived as inherently antagonistic, I identify the contradiction between imposed and self-organized forms of cooperation as the crucial factor regulating social production forces.