Means of Production (Marx)

The means of production are the facilities, tools, infrastructure, resources, and assets used to produce goods and services in an economy. They include factories, machinery, technology, land, raw materials, transportation, and any other equipment or infrastructure that goes into production.

Things That DO Count as Means of Production

The means of production are the material elements that the labourer acts upon and with, in order to create a new product.

When functioning as capital, these material elements are generally referred to as constant capital because their value is merely transferred to the final product, rather than expanded.

The primary components of the means of production fall into two categories:

1. Instruments of Labour

These are the things the labourer interposes between himself and the subject of his labour, acting as the conductor of his activity.

These items retain their original shape throughout their useful life, entering the labour process as a whole, but transferring their value only piecemeal through wear and tear.

Specific examples include:

• Tools and Implements: Simple tools are included in this category.
• Machines and Machinery: Factories and machines are critical means of production, especially in capitalist society. In modern industry, machinery is the characteristic instrument of labour.
• Infrastructure and Buildings: Workshops, canals, roads, and similar items are instrumental objects resulting from previous labour that are necessary for carrying on the labour-process, even though they do not directly enter into the process.
• Vessels and Accessories: Things like pipes, tubs, baskets, jars, and other objects used to hold materials, though they do not directly transfer labour to the subject, are included among the instruments of labour in a wider sense.

2. Subjects of Labour (Raw Materials)

This category includes the material upon which labour is exerted. They transfer their entire value to the product as they lose their original use-value by changing form.

Specific examples include:

• Raw Materials: Materials that have been “filtered through previous labour,” such as extracted ore, cotton, yarn, wool, and seed.
• Auxiliary Substances/Materials: Items consumed by the instruments of labour (like coal under a boiler or oil for a wheel), or mixed with the raw material (like dye-stuff or chlorine).
• Land/Soil: While often provided by nature, land can act as a subject of labour (if virgin soil is being broken up), or as a universal instrument of labour, furnishing a space for the labourer. Land, along with other items, constitutes income-producing property.
• Money (when functioning as capital): Money advanced by the capitalist is converted into the material means of production.

3. Means of Subsistence (Context-Dependent)

Products that serve as use-values can sometimes act as means of production for a later process.

Grapes, for example, are ready for consumption, but can also serve as the raw material for a further product, such as wine.

The line is not fixed.

The means of subsistence necessary for the labourer’s reproduction are commodities that constitute the value of labour-power.

For capital, these means of subsistence are necessary for the existence and reproduction of the working class, which is a condition for the reproduction of capital.

Why is Ownership Important to Marx?

The legal ownership of the means of production is recognized as a source of immense power and forms the foundation of class stratification in sociological conflict theory.

Basis of Class Conflict

Karl Marx stressed that in capitalistic societies, a continuous clash exists between the owners of the means of production and the workers.

This relationship is characterized by two distinct social classes:

• The Capitalist Class (Bourgeoisie): This ruling class consists of those with great wealth who own the means of production – such as land, capital, factories, and machines. Those who own and control the means of production (the economic base) dominate the economic sphere and can translate this power into political and ideological control.
• The Working Class (Proletariat): The working class, or proletariat, consists of the majority who do not own the means of production and must sell their labour-power (the capacity to work) to the owners to earn a livelihood and survive.

This creates an automatic conflict of interest between the two classes. The bourgeoisie wants to maintain its position at the top, while the proletariat wants to rise from the bottom.

The entire social system can be seen as an ongoing struggle between the “haves” and the “have nots.”

Enabling Exploitation and Surplus Value Extraction

For Marx, ownership is the prerequisite for the capitalist process of exploitation, whereby the capitalist legally extracts value created by the worker.

• Appropriation of Unpaid Labor: The product generated through the labour process becomes the property of the capitalist and not the labourer, the immediate producer. Ownership grants the capitalist the right to appropriate the unpaid labour of others or its product.
• Mechanism of Profit: Exploitation occurs because capitalists maximize profits by paying workers less than the resale value of what they produce but do not own. The wealth created by the working class is appropriated privately by the bourgeoisie in the form of profits.
• Double freedom: The worker is “free” in two senses, free to sell their labour-power, and free of any tools or land, leaving no choice but to sell it to a capitalist.

Alienation

Alienation from the Product of Labour

The worker’s alienation from the product of their labour stems directly from not owning the means of production, tools, factories, and the rest. They are compelled to take part in a capitalist process built around the capitalist’s right of ownership and appropriation.

This alienation, specifically the alienation from the product of one’s labour, occurs through a series of legal, economic, and technical separations inherent to the capitalist mode of production.

1. The Separation of Labour-Power and Ownership

The core precondition for alienation is the complete separation of the labourer from all property in the means of production.

This separation necessitates the worker entering the market to sell their only remaining commodity: their capacity to work, or labour-power.

• The Capitalist’s Purchase: The capitalist purchases the worker’s labour-power for a set period, such as a day or a week. Its use, the labour actually performed, then belongs to the capitalist.
• The Worker’s Legal Status: The worker is “free” in two senses: free to sell their own labour-power, but also free of any tools or land. That second freedom is what forces the first.
• Incorporation into Capital: Once the worker enters the workshop, their labour-power becomes living labour in action, immediately incorporated into the owner’s capital. Marx called workers “special modes of existence of capital.”

2. Appropriation of the Product by the Capitalist

The capitalist legally owns all the factors of production: raw material, machines, and the labour-power consumed. Because of this, the resulting product is exclusively the capitalist’s property, not the labourer’s, even though the labourer is its immediate producer.

• Property Rights: The worker receives a wage and hands over the use of their labour, under the ordinary laws of exchange. The means of production and the resulting product then both belong to the capitalist.
• Surplus Value: The capitalist appropriates the whole product, including a surplus-value, unpaid labour, that costs the worker labour but costs the capitalist nothing.

The worker, by selling their labour-power, renounces all claim to a share in the product.

The resulting alienation from the product means the individual does not have the opportunity to relate to the product he labors on.

3. The Technical and Intellectual Alienation

Alienation is deepened by the technical organisation of capitalist production, particularly through the division of labour and the introduction of machinery.

• Loss of Individual Character: The extensive division of labour strips work of its individual character. A detail labourer produces no commodity of their own, only a fragment of what many labourers make together.
• Domination by the Instrument: The worker becomes a living appendage of the machinery system, which now dictates the conditions of production. In the factory, the machine makes use of the worker, not the other way round.
• Intellectual Separation (Reification): The knowledge, judgment, and will the whole process requires are taken from the individual labourer. They become the property of the capitalist instead.

This material structure ensures that the product the worker creates is constantly converted into capital, an alien power that dominates and exploits them.

The worker views their own productive output as an opus alienum (a strange facticity) over which they have no control, rather than as the opus proprium (their own product).

The result is estrangement.

This specific form of alienation contributes to the overall reification of social reality. The products of human activity come to be seen as things separate from, or even superior to, human activity itself.

Things That Do NOT Count as Means of Production

The items that do not count as means of production fall into a few groups. They are typically non-material, non-ownable legal entities; natural elements with no incorporated human labour; or the subjective, human factor of the labour process itself.

1. Labour/Labour-Power (Crucial Exclusion)

Labour and labour-power are definitively not means of production in capitalist society.

• Labour-Power (Capacity for Labour): This refers to the aggregate of mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being. It is the commodity the worker sells to the capitalist.
  
  Because it is a legal entity that cannot be permanently sold, it is excluded from the means of production. The employer buys only the ability to use an employee’s labour. The sale of labour-power is what enables the capitalist to start the labour process by converting the labourer into “labour-power in action”.
• Labour (Work): Labour itself, which is the use-value of labour-power, is the value-creating substance embodied in commodities. Labour is the substance and immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself and thus cannot be a commodity in the same sense as MOP.
  
  Human labour in motion creates value but is not itself value; it only becomes value in its congealed state when embodied in an object.
• Variable Capital: The portion of capital laid out upon labour-power is called variable capital. This is distinct from constant capital (the MOP), because it undergoes a quantitative alteration of value (creating surplus-value).

Historical Exception: The only historical instance where workers themselves are considered part of the means of production is in slave societies.

2. Natural Resources Without Incorporated Labour

If an object’s utility to man is not due to human labour, it can be a use-value but possesses no value.

These spontaneously supplied natural resources, while potentially factors in production, transfer no value to the product and are thus typically excluded from the strict economic definition of MOP (constant capital).

Examples include:

• Air.
• Virgin soil and natural meadows.
• Water, wind, and metals in situ (before extraction).
• Timber in virgin forests.
• Uncaught fish.
• Natural forces like wind, water, steam, and electricity when appropriated for productive processes, cost nothing, although apparatuses (like a water-wheel) must be built to exploit them.

3. Non-Material and Abstract Elements

These elements are part of the broader forces of production but cannot be legally owned, or do not constitute a tangible asset whose value is transferred.

• Knowledge/Science/Technology: Knowledge (scientific/technical and the like) is part of the Forces of production but is explicitly noted as not being among the parts that can be legally owned as means of production. Science becomes a productive force distinct from labour, but once discovered, the law of a physical phenomenon costs never a penny.
• Use Value (Utility): While necessary for a commodity to have value, use-value (utility) is a quality, not the economic category of the MOP itself, and its existence is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate useful qualities.

In summary:

The means of production are analogous to a factory’s physical inventory and infrastructure: the building, the machines, and the raw materials. All of these are legally owned, and all transfer their pre-existing value to the final product.

Labour-power, by contrast, is the engine that uses those assets to create new value. This capacity cannot be permanently owned in a capitalist society. So it stays conceptually separate from the means of production.

The Evolution of the Means of Production: Automation, Data, and Platforms

Marx’s own examples of the means of production came from the factories of his own time. That much is well known. But what counts as the means of production is not fixed. In agrarian economies, land was the decisive asset.

Industrialisation changed that. It shifted power to whoever owned factories and machinery instead.

By the late twentieth century, economists were already describing a further shift. They called it the arrival of a post-industrial society, an economy organised around information rather than material goods (Bell, 1973).

That shift continues today. Software, data, and digital platforms increasingly occupy the position factories once held.

Automating Capital: Robots and Algorithms as Instruments of Labour

An industrial robot is, in Marx’s own terms, an instrument of labour. It sits between the worker and the object of production. It keeps its own shape through repeated use.

It transfers value to the product only gradually, through wear and depreciation. That is exactly how Marx’s own machinery worked.

What’s new is the scale. A modern robot can replace a worker’s labour-power altogether, not merely make it more productive.

This sharpens Marx’s original question. Who benefits when a given amount of output needs less paid labour to produce?

Because capital owns the robot, not the workers it displaces, any productivity gains flow to the capitalist by default. They are not automatically shared with labour.

A large recent study, discussed under Contemporary Research below, puts numbers on exactly this effect.

Data as a New Form of Capital

A growing body of research treats large-scale data collection as a form of capital accumulation. This is a genuinely new idea.

Platforms extract data from users’ ordinary activity: search queries, location histories, purchases. Little of this is freely given.

This mirrors how raw materials were once extracted from nature. The same disregard for consent or compensation applies (Sadowski, 2019).

The data becomes a raw material in its own right. It is refined and analysed to produce a valuable product.

The people who generate that data do not own it. Nor are they usually paid for producing it.

Where Marx’s raw materials were physical, ore, cotton, wool, the raw material of the data economy is behavioural. Search history and social connections take their place.

Platforms as Infrastructural Means of Production

Major technology firms have reorganised their business around the platform. A platform is an infrastructural foundation, such as search, cloud computing, or ride-hailing.

Other businesses, workers, and users must build their own activity on top of it, whether or not they are formally employed by the platform owner (Srnicek, 2017). That dependence is the real point.

Independent workers who drive, deliver, or moderate content for a platform own none of the infrastructure their labour depends on. These developments do not replace Marx’s basic question, only its setting.

Ownership still decides who holds power. Whoever owns the decisive productive asset holds power over the people who depend on it without owning it themselves.

The asset’s form has simply changed, from a factory, to a robot, to a platform’s servers.

Critical Evaluation

The idea that legal ownership of productive assets organises class and power has real staying power. It also faces serious challenges in a service-and-knowledge economy.

Strengths and Limits of the Ownership Criterion

Several developments complicate the simple ownership/non-ownership divide Marx used.

• Rise of human capital: Scarce skills and credentials, not ownership of physical or digital assets, increasingly determine high incomes for professionals and specialists.
• Diffuse, rented capital: Cloud computing and gig platforms let firms and workers operate productively while owning very little fixed capital themselves.
• Contradictory class locations: Erik Olin Wright (1997) showed that organisational authority or scarce skill can each secure a share of profits without any ownership of capital.
• Persistent concentration: Ownership of productive wealth keeps concentrating rather than spreading out across advanced economies, even as its form diversifies.
• Gender and race neglect: Classical Marxist analysis said little about how gender and race shape access to ownership, or to the unpaid domestic labour sustaining the paid workforce.

Despite these qualifications, the core insight holds. Whoever legally owns the decisive productive asset holds power over people who depend on it without owning it themselves. That pattern has persisted from feudal landholding to today’s platform infrastructure.

Comparison with Rival Theories

Max Weber offers a rival account.

He and his successors treat class as a matter of graded market position and work situation, producing far more gradations than a strict owner/non-owner split.

John Goldthorpe’s influential class scheme classifies occupations this way. It does not rely on ownership of productive assets at all.

The scheme has been used across many countries to study patterns of social mobility (Erikson & Goldthorpe, 1992).

Consider two workers.

A senior salaried professional and a routine clerical worker occupy very different positions, despite both being, in Marx’s strict sense, non-owners of the means of production.

Critics see a risk here. Large capital owners are rare in survey samples. Occupational schemes like Goldthorpe’s can therefore write the concentrated power of ownership back out of the picture Marx’s criterion was designed to capture.

Human capital theory is a second rival account.

Developed chiefly by economists, it argues that income reflects accumulated human capital: education, training, skills, and experience, rather than ownership of the means of production (Becker, 1964).

A software engineer illustrates the point.

They earn a high income not because they own any productive assets, but because their skills command a high price in a competitive labour market.

Conflict theorists push back. The opportunity to acquire valuable human capital is itself unequally distributed by family background.

Human capital theory can therefore end up treating a class-patterned outcome as though it were a neutral, individually chosen investment.

Contemporary Research

The strongest recent evidence on who benefits when capital substitutes for labour comes from a large study of industrial automation. The numbers are striking.

This is a large, quasi-experimental study published in one of economics’ most selective journals, so it sits well up the evidence hierarchy for this question.

Its main limitation is that it covers only the United States up to 2007, before the more recent acceleration in AI-based automation. That is a real limitation.

A related, though more conceptual, argument treats large-scale data collection as a parallel form of capital accumulation (Sadowski, 2019). The comparison is a loose one. Platform owners extract data from users much as capitalists once extracted raw materials and labour.

This argument is interpretive rather than quasi-experimental, so it carries less evidential weight than the robot-adoption findings above. Even so, the direction matches. It points toward the same underlying pattern: owners of the decisive asset continue to capture a disproportionate share of the gains.

References

Acemoglu, D., & Restrepo, P. (2020). Robots and jobs: Evidence from US labor markets. Journal of Political Economy, 128(6), 2188–2244. https://doi.org/10.1086/705716

Becker, G. S. (1964). Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education. National Bureau of Economic Research.

Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. Basic Books.

Engels, F. (1974). The German ideology, Part One: With selections from Parts Two and Three, together with Marx’s “Introduction to a critique of political economy”. Lawrence & Wishart.

Erikson, R., & Goldthorpe, J. H. (1992). The constant flux: A study of class mobility in industrial societies. Clarendon Press.

Gates, H. (1996). China’s Motor: a thousand years of petty capitalism. Cornell University Press.

Jessop, R. (1990). Mode of production. In Marxian economics (pp. 289-296). Palgrave Macmillan, London.

Marx, K., & Engels, F. (1967). The Communist Manifesto (S. Moore, Trans.).

Marx, K., Cohen, J., & Hobsbawm, E. J. (1966). Pre-capitalist economic formations. Science and Society, 30(3).

Modes and Means of Production. (2021, July 22). https://socialsci.libretexts.org/@go/page/56423

Wolf, E. R. (1982). Europe and the People without History. Univ of California Press.

Resnick, S. A., & Wolff, R. D. (2013). Marxism. Rethinking Marxism, 25(2), 152-162.

Sadowski, J. (2019). When data is capital: Datafication, accumulation, and extraction. Big Data & Society, 6(1). https://doi.org/10.1177/2053951718820549

Srnicek, N. (2017). Platform capitalism. Polity Press.

Wolpe, H. (1980). The Articulation of Modes of Production: Essays from Economy and Society. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Wright, E. O. (1997). Class counts: Comparative studies in class analysis. Cambridge University Press.

Summary Table

Category	Example	Status as Means of Production	Reason/Context
Instruments of Labour	Machines, tools, factories, workshops, canals, oil (consumed by a machine)	DO count (Constant Capital, c)	Legally owned, material elements that transfer their value (wear and tear) to the product.
Subjects of Labour	Raw cotton, extracted ore, seed, dye-stuff	DO count (Constant Capital, c)	Legally owned, material elements upon which labour is exerted and which transfer their whole value to the product.
Labour-Power	The worker’s capacity to work (their skills, muscles, nerves)	DO NOT count (Variable Capital, v)	Cannot be legally owned by the capitalist; it is the commodity the worker sells. It is the sole source of new value.
Knowledge/Science	Technical knowledge, scientific laws, chemistry	DO NOT count	Non-material elements of the Forces of Production that cannot be legally owned.
Natural Forces	Wind, water, metals in situ, timber in virgin forests, uncaught fish	DO NOT count	Supplied by Nature without human labour; they help create use-value but transfer no exchange-value to the product.
The Worker (Slave)	The labourer’s person	DO count (Historically)	Only in slave societies are workers considered part of the means of production.