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:
“Artists have a double relationship towards nature: they are her master and her slave at the same time. They are her slave in so far as they must work with means of this world so as to be understood; her master in so far as they subject these means to their higher goals and make them subservient to them.”
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