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.
Read more about Means Of Production: Related Terms, Marxist Analysis of Ownership of The Means of Production Within Capitalism
Famous quotes containing the words means of, means and/or production:
“To develop an empiricist account of science is to depict it as involving a search for truth only about the empirical world, about what is actual and observable.... It must involve throughout a resolute rejection of the demand for an explanation of the regularities in the observable course of nature, by means of truths concerning a reality beyond what is actual and observable, as a demand which plays no role in the scientific enterprise.”
—Bas Van Fraassen (b. 1941)
“Conspicuous consumption of valuable goods is a means of reputability to the gentleman of leisure.”
—Thorstein Veblen (1857–1929)
“... if the production of any commodity necessitates the sacrifice of human life, society should do without that commodity, but it can not do without that life.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)