在卡尔·马克思和弗里德里希·恩格斯以及后来的一些马克思主义學者的理论著作中,生产社会化是指商品的生产和銷售从個人的行为转变为社会和集体的行為的过程。在资本主义出現之前,基本上商品生產僅需个人就能獨自完成。随着资本主义的发展,商品生产開始集中在企业,并且商品生產過程越来越机械化。生产社会化的產生原因是由于资本在相關产业日益集中,資本投資回报率不断提高,劳动分工不断深化以及日益复杂的生产形式和生產技術专业化[1]。
马克思在政治经济学批判中指出,随着资本主义的发展,生產社会化与剩余价值之间出现矛盾。古典马克思主义者认为,这种矛盾激化到一定程度,就必须通過生产资料社会所有制的形式实现剩余价值的社会化,从而实现资本主义向社会主义过渡[2]。
備註
Capital, Volume 1, by Marx, Karl. From "Chapter 32: Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation": "Self-earned private property, that is based, so to say, on the fusing together of the isolated, independent laboring-individual with the conditions of his labor, is supplanted by capitalistic private property, which rests on exploitation of the nominally free labor of others, i.e., on wage-labor. As soon as this process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society from top to bottom, as soon as the laborers are turned into proletarians, their means of labor into capital, as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then the further socialization of labor and further transformation of the land and other means of production into socially exploited and, therefore, common means of production, as well as the further expropriation of private proprietors, takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers."