Marxist terms, part 1: Means of production

The means of production are all the materials, tools, equipment, machinery, stores, warehouses, software, etc. that humanity needs in order to create dignified lives. In the Marxist quest for human freedom, revolution boils down to the working class seizing the means of production. What exactly does that mean?

Picture a dignified life. What do you see? Certainly food, water, clothes and housing. Transportation, education and healthcare. Different forms of entertainment. You probably agree that all people on earth deserve these things.

So how are these things created? How, in other words, are they produced? In almost every sense, they are  produced socially rather than individually. Take food — say an ear of corn. For corn to get from a farm to your kitchen, a particular kind of seed must be planted in a particular kind of soil. The plant must be protected, often with herbicides and pesticides. The corn must be watered and tended with fertilizers until it’s ready to be harvested. It must be picked, husked, packaged and sent to a market, where you can buy it.  Those are a lot of steps!

All of the material involved in that process — from the supermarket back to the harvesting equipment to the seed and crucially to the land itself — makes up the means of production. And under capitalism, virtually everything in this process is owned by private corporations motivated by private profits. Communism is nothing more than the struggle of the people to take democratic ownership of these means of production.

One might be thinking: “Why should I even want that? We have capitalism now, and corn is pretty cheap and pretty good!” But is it? In the capitalist media landscape of the U.S., we’ve certainly been conditioned by billions of dollars of

corporate spending to think that there is nothing more to corn than going to your local store. But think of all the ways in which, around just this one crop, capitalist ownership of the means of production — reaping immense profits for the owners of agriculture, fertilizer, food and fuel companies — has subverted the will of the people.

Capitalist agriculture has pushed corn syrup into countless food items, helping cause an obesity epidemic that has taken untold lives and cost billions of dollars in healthcare spending. Corporate pesticides and fertilizers for corn and other crops are an enormous factor contributing to climate collapse, while the capitalists’ promise of fuel produced from ethanol has held back the fight for true clean energy for a generation.

Corporate farm owners force migrant farm workers into conditions not much better than enslavement while denying them political representation.  And the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) destroyed hundreds of thousands of livelihoods for Mexican corn growers. And an even deeper motivation lies with the land itself — the earliest colonizers of what’s now called the United States committed genocide in the name of “clearing” land of Indigenous nations to plant corn. In each of these instances, the demands of capitalism directly crushed the demands, needs and rights of the people.

Imagine these same processes repeated with the means of production of every part of life, and you’ll grasp the full extent of the destruction caused by capitalism. Now imagine true democracy — ownership of the means of production by the people, not the capitalists. This is the future the workers and oppressed can win together. But only if they fight for it.