The relations of production and the enormous productive forces – that is the working class, organised in these huge industries expanding across the globe, – they are now in contradiction. This society, the existence of mankind, the advance and progression of mankind, is now in contradiction with capitalism, with private ownership over the means of production.
The progressive role of capitalism
Unlike previous modes of production like slavery or feudalism, capitalists buy the labour power of workers, where competition then forces them to get as much out of the worker as they can. It gives the capitalists an incentive to invest into that worker to make them more productive / more skilled, but also to intensify their labor, to get more profit out of them, as well as reducing the cost of their labor, so they can produce below the socially neccessary labour time. It creates this drive to invest into machinery and automation, to increase the productivity, aka increase the amount of use-value that is produced in a given unit of labor time → rapid development of the productive forces in the golden age of capitalism.
→ This is also why today, technology is feared and not viewed as something progressive: People understand that technology is not introduced for our benefit, but for capitalist profits.
The internal contradictions within these progressive forces of capitalism pile up and turn into their opposite.
One such contradiction manifests in the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall.
Development of productive forces is massively slowed / impeded through the limits of the nation state and the profitability constraint.
There is still development of the productive forces…
as they are forced to compete and develop machinery.
However, productivity in many cases is stagnating or very low. This is, because it is much cheaper to outsource work to less developed countries with lower wages or migrant work, rather than investing in a new factory or machine, among other things.