The Production-Process of Capital

From beneath the motion of industrial capital where it has so far remained hidden now emerges the production of use-values in general. The latter which we call the labour-and-production process in the dialectic of capital is common to all societies, but it is divested of all extra-economic contingencies. It forms the material foundation of trans- or supra-historic economic life regardless of its social form. No society can exist without production, which is here defined as “the human being’s purposive activity on nature so as to transform part of it into readily (i.e. directly or productively) consumable use-values”. That this is a supra-historic condition of human existence can scarcely be doubted, despite the mystification of the concept of production by bourgeois economics. A clear distinction must be maintained between the production of material objects (use-values), which involves the human being’s purposive action on nature, and the mere rendering of services by one person to another, which neither directly nor indirectly involves any transformation of nature.