In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' own critique of political economy, it refers to the combination of the means of labor (tools, machinery, land, infrastructure, and so on) with human labour power.
Marx and Engels probably derived the concept from Adam Smith's reference to the "productive powers of labour" (see e.g. chapter 8 of The Wealth of Nations (1776)), although the German political economist Friedrich List also mentions the concept of "productive powers" in The National System of Political Economy (1841).
All those forces which are applied by people in the production process (body and brain, tools and techniques, materials, resources, quality of workers' cooperation, and equipment) are encompassed by this concept, including those management and engineering functions technically indispensable for production (as contrasted with social control functions).
Indeed, Marx sees the essence of what he calls "the capital relation" as being summarised by the circumstance that "capital buys labour", i.e. the power of property ownership to command human energy and labour-time, and thus of inanimate "things" to exert an autonomous power over people.
Unlike British classical economics, Marxian economics classifies financial capital as being an element of the relations of production, rather than the factors or forces of production ("not a thing, but a social relation between persons, established by the instrumentality of things").
[3] Marx and Engels did not believe that human history featured a continuous growth of the productive forces.
(...) Competition soon compelled every country that wished to retain its historical role to protect its manufactures [sic] by renewed customs regulations (the old duties were no longer any good against big industry) and soon after to introduce big industry under protective duties.
Big industry universalised competition in spite of these protective measures (it is practical free trade; the protective duty is only a palliative, a measure of defence within free trade), established means of communication and the modern world market, subordinated trade to itself, transformed all capital into industrial capital, and thus produced the rapid circulation (development of the financial system) and the centralisation of capital.
In the place of naturally grown towns it created the modern, large industrial cities which have sprung up overnight.
; English web-version of the article [2]; original version in Russian [3])According to this, productive forces have such structure: Marxism in USSR served as core philosophical paradigm or platform, and had been developing as a science.
Other interpretations, sometimes influenced by postmodernism and the concept of commodity fetishism have by contrast emphasized the reification of the powers of technology, said to occur by the separation of technique from the producers, and by falsely imputing human powers to technology as autonomous force, the effect being a perspective of inevitable and unstoppable technological progress operating beyond any human control, and impervious to human choices.
In turn, this is said to have the effect of naturalising and legitimating social arrangements produced by people, by asserting that they are technically inevitable.
In 1984 Deng Xiaoping declared "the fundamental task for the socialist stage is to develop the productive forces".
[5] For Deng "only by constantly developing the productive forces can a country gradually become strong and prosperous, with a rising standard of living.