Description: “Productivity is the production of surplus value – it means producing output values in excess of the value of the input factors. Technology in a capitalist society is geared to the end of making the productive collectives more efficient at producing surplus value. In the course of so doing our skills and knowledge of how to shape natural circumstances to human requirements are enlarged. But whilst there is in technology a content that goes beyond the particular historical circumstances of the society in which it originates, one cannot separate technology from the type of economy in which it is used. Our technology is a capitalist technology devoted essentially to productivity measured in terms of production of surplus exchange values, exchange values surplus to those used up in the production process, what in Marx’s terminology is known as surplus value.”
