Marx described how subsumption shapes productive forces: Capital investment transforms the social organization of labor, its facilities, tools, technology and science. Under "real subsumption," capital controls and fully organizes the productive process to maximize surplus or to ultimately maximize surplus. So today people in the US live dozens of miles from where they work and must drive a car on congested highways from bungalows and ranch houses to work. Highways will always become congested because every new highway opens more farm land for new home subdivisions as the economy grows. Our food, clothing, and every other commodity comes packaged in plastic. Oil is needed for everything we consume or use. The extraction and burning of fossil fuels is rapidly warming the earth.
Our challenge in the developed capitalist countries is not to unleash the productive forces for further growth in commodity production because commodity production is today destroying the human ecosystem. But about undeveloped countries? In 1867, Marx wrote that
"The country that is more developed industrially only shows, to the less developed, the image of its own future."
That's no longer true: It is not physically possible to replicate the US lifestyle in any other sizable, poor country. So when John Bellamy Foster extolls "Chines Ecological Civilization" as China "catches up" with the US, he is describing something that is not physically possible. The developed world no longer offers a feasible model of development for the rest of the world. They and we need a different model to produce use values rather than exchange values.
As far as I can tell, concept of "freeing" productive forces comes from a sentence that Marx inserted in the 1859 Preface to a Critique of Political Economy,
"When the relations of production become a fetters on the development of the productive forces, a period of social revolution begins."
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