ABSTRACT
Over the last hundred years or more the number and type of material objects and services processed by capitalist economies have significantly changed, but the social relations of production have not. Marx (1976) proposed the distinction between the forces of production and the social relations of production to convey this idea. The existence of a social relationship between a class of capitalists and a class of workers mediated by wages and profits is an invariant feature of capitalism, whereas the types of objects and activities subsumed under this social relationship is not.
