Unproductive labour and exploitation
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ALB wrote: “No judgement is implied on the importance or worth of either type of work … productive and unproductive labour“.
This encapsulates really well, the point I was making.
For the vast majority of workers, the judgement is implied by the prefix ‘un’.
They’re the ones working really hard for shit wages, being told by their academic betters, who really understand this sort of stuff, that they are unproductive.
Still, as long as the ‘class conscious’ elite understand our world, socialism will be along in a jiffy.
Hmmm… how long has Marx been dead? And how well has this ‘materialist analysis’ of the ‘objective facts’ fared in producing class consciousness in the masses? The unproductive masses, that is.
They’re the ones working really hard for shit wages, being told by their academic betters, who really understand this sort of stuff, that they are unproductive.
They are not being told this by academic elites, but by their fellow workers.
As the A to Z of Marxism explains, a distinction between labour that produces surplus value and labour that doesn’t is needed to understand how capitalism works (and could not work, e.g. made to be geared to individual and social consumption).
Capitalism is an economic system of capital accumulation out of surplus value so labour that produces surplus value is crucial to it. The distinction between the two types of labour has to be made whatever name is given to each.
Incidentally, in the terminology Marx inherited and used, a person employed by a cleaning firm to clean toilets would be a “productive” worker while academics employed by universities (except private profit-seeking ones) would be “unproductive” workers.
Matthew Culbert wrote: “They are not being told this by academic elites, but by their fellow workers.”
That’s not true, Matthew.
At best, it’s ‘by some of their fellow workers’.
That is, ‘by academic elites and some of their fellow workers’.
I’d argue that those ‘some fellow workers’ have been ideologically duped by the ‘academic elites’. As you know, Marx argued that ‘the ruling ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class’. So, we’d expect ‘some fellow workers’ to vote for Johnson, too. There are all kinds of mistakes being made by our fellow workers, at present.
As to your claim, there are clearly some other fellow workers who disagree with this use of ‘unproductive’ by the academic elite, like Cope. I’m one, and I think marcos also expressed his disagreement with this usage, earlier, but I’ll leave it to him to clarify his own position.
ALB wrote: “The distinction between the two types of labour has to be made whatever name is given to each.”
Yes, I’ve already made this suggestion, ALB, earlier on the thread.
And I’ve explained why ‘un-‘ isn’t a useful term, given that surely we’re writing to explain the world that workers live in, and surely it should be in terms that are easy to grasp, rather than those that are counter-intuitive.
I’m a great believer in the theory that bourgeois academics consciously write as obscurely as possible, to actually prevent workers understanding what is being written, and so thus being able to criticise it.
A lot of what passes for ‘learning’ in bourgeois society will disappear within a democratic socialist society, where any ‘learning’ would be entirely democratic, in its concepts, theories, methods and results. Marx thought that ‘science’ would be ‘revolutionised’, and I can’t imagine that not meaning ‘democratised’.
LBird I think you are making a bit of meal of this. Marx himself talked of workers being unproductive in the narrow technical sense of not producing surplus value. But as I mentioned before, he also talked of workers being productive in the wider sense of producing use values. So a person who is being unproductive in the narrow sense can be productive in the wider sense that Marx referred to. So long as you qualify what you are talking about I dont see that there should be a problem.
Its not being derogatory as long as you explain what you mean by the term. Its not a reflection on the person but on the job they do. Years ago I worked a brief stint in the tax office. I was bored stiff with the job and would have readily concurred with anyone who said I was doing unproductive work in every sense of the term. Workers DO often feel alienated from their work – particularly when the see it as being pointless and producing no obvious social benefit
In the narrow sense, unproductive work as a category is, I believe, very useful from the standpoint of understanding the mechanics of capitalism. I am quite interested in Fred Moseley’s argument that the growth of unproductive labour has contributed to a falling rate of profit in the post war era at least among the advanced capitalist economies. There are of course half a dozen or so counter tendencies to the falling rate of profit that Marx touched upon but the interesting thing about Marx’s model and his prpductive/unproductive dichotomy is that it enables you to see how certain structural constraints might come into play and even to predict or anticipate certain developments that might arise from the fact that there are limits to the size of the unproductive sector in the economy.
However, this thread is essentially concerned with the relation between unproductive labour and exploitation. I want to reiterate the central point that is being made – that just because some workers perform unproductive work (dont produce surplus value) does NOT mean they are not exploited. You dont have to produce surplus value to be exploited. Productive labour is only the visible tip of the iceberg, for that iceberg to keep afloat it requires unproductive labour as well
Exploitation is a class-wide and an economy-wide phenomenon . It is not confined to one section of the working class (productive workers) or one part of the globe (the Global South) as people like Zac Cope maintain
robbo203 wrote: “LBird I think you are making a bit of meal of this.”
Hmmm… I could translate this for other workers as meaning ‘There’s no room for a worker to question the concepts employed by academics, who know better‘… But I won’t.
I think that I’ve made my point to you – if you fail to question Cope’s concepts, you’ll end up either agreeing with him about them (which you might want to do), or you’ll misunderstand his argument, and waste your valuable time attacking a straw man.
Further, and specifically about ‘unproductive’, if you’re happy with the concept being employed by both sides, go ahead and write a critique of Cope’s text. Personally, I’d rip his theoretical framework to shreds, and probably ignore the thus pointless task of giving his text serious detailed attention.
As for ‘exploitation’, if you agree that all ‘productive labour’ in this society is a product of ‘exploitation’, what’s the payoff for the average worker to spend time discerning between your ‘unproductive’ and your ‘productive’?
I’m inclined to advise workers that the ‘angels on a pinhead’-type debates are alive and well in academia, and are irrelevant to workers. The ‘left-wing’ academics are about as accurate about the supposed ‘workings of capitalism’ as are the bourgeois economists! Whether the texts of Marx, Keynes or Hayek are invoked as ‘The Bible’.
And I’d tell them to focus on your final statement:
robbo203 wrote: “Exploitation is a class-wide and an economy-wide phenomenon . It is not confined to one section of the working class … or one part of the globe (the Global South) as people like Zac Cope maintain”
Well, except for the bit I’ve deleted! I’d insert “… (black, white, men, women, gay, straight, domestic, immigrant, etc.)”.
if you fail to question Cope’s concepts, you’ll end up either agreeing with him about them (which you might want to do), or you’ll misunderstand his argument, and waste your valuable time attacking a straw man.
There is no chance of that. He is using the concept of unproductive labour in the sense that Marx used it to mean workers who do not produce commodities/surplus value and inferring from this that they are not exploited to back up his general point that the workers in the developed economies are not exploited because according to him they consume more value than they produce. THAT is what I am attacking and it is certainly not a straw man argument
Of course, if workers in the developed economies consumed more in value terms than what they produced there would be no point in setting and operating a business anywhere in the developed world since there would be no profit to be made in doing so. Where the developed world would acquire the means of purchase goods made in the Global South is anyone’s guess. For more than two decades now many big corporations in the West have been cutting their ties with the whole business of producing stuff and have been focussing instead on branding the finished product for sale in Western stores (see Naomi Klein’s book No Logo on this)
Incidentally this idea of Cope’s – that whether or not one is exploited as a worker depends on a net balance between the production and consumption of value – has a certain homologous relationship to the way sections of the left define imperialism . An imperialist nation is defined as one which has net balance in terms of income flows in the form of profit rent and interest. So China by this criterion is considered not to be an imperialist country despite the fact that Chinese capital penetrates most parts of the world
robbo203 wrote: “[Cope] is using the concept of unproductive labour in the sense that Marx used it…“.
In itself, this argument from authority doesn’t mean that the concept (or its title) is invulnerable to criticism. Perhaps Marx should be criticised.
Or, perhaps Cope or you (or both of youse) are misunderstanding Marx.
I’ve had a good run at this issue, and you’ve understood my point, so I’ll leave it at that, and let you decide just what your critical approach should be to Cope’s text. On the whole, I think I’m a lot closer to you than I am to Cope.
But… things are relative.
I’m uncontrollably compelled to write “just as ‘material’ is relative to humans“, though I’m already slapping my own wrist! 🙂
Not all productive (in the sense of transforming materials that originally came from nature into something useful) labour under capitalism is exploited. Not that of self-employed plumbers for instance. And how!
The description “unproductive” was originally used by the ideologists of the rising industrial capitalist class to criticise the established ruling landed aristocracy. The intention was to show that the workers the industrial capitalists employed benefitted society by increasing the amount of wealth in existence while those employed by aristocrats (their servants) used up existing wealth and was a waste of resources — and to justify the industrial capitalists taking over as a new ruling class.
It was like us calling the capital class drones and parasites.
In this society everything has a historical explanation, like in the legal system is said that every law has a history. The concept of productive and unproductive labour has its history as I said in another message which it was described by Marx in an epoch when productive labour prevailed over unproductive labour, or unproductive labour was sub estimated, and the capitalist supported the concept of productive labour vs unproductive labour. Nowadays we have plumber, carpenter and masonry workers who own their own business and they work independently,( They are called blue collars workers ) and we have independent accountants, lawyers, medical doctors ( called white collars workers ) and they are not exploited, and some of that business owner they also have their salary, and he/she can be called salaried worker too, but they are not exploited in the sense that Marx expressed on Capital. As I said we have to be flexible with both terms
Not all productive (in the sense of transforming materials that originally came from nature into something useful) labour under capitalism is exploited. Not that of self-employed plumbers for instance
The question of self-employed labour is an interesting one from a Marxian perspective
Marx own views on the subject can be inferred from his criticism of the idea that the peasant proprietor was both a capitalist and worker wrapped up in the same person:
‘The means of production become capital only in so far as they have become separated from labourer and confront labour as an independent power. But in the case referred to the producer—the labourer—is the possessor, the owner, of his means of production. They are therefore not capital, any more than in relation to them he is a wage labourer.” Capital Vol 1
So peasants and independent craftspeople were neither productive (in the sense of producing surplus value)
‘They confront me as sellers of commodities, not as sellers of labour, and this relation therefore has nothing to do with the exchange of capital for labour, therefore also has nothing to do with the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, which depends entirely on whether the labour is exchanged for money as money or for money as capital. They therefore belong neither to the category of productive or unproductive labourers, although they are producers of commodities. But their production does not fall under the capitalist mode of production”
What of the self-employed plumber you mention above ALB? He or she is definitely a seller of labour. Is this a case of self-exploitation? Are worker co-ops a case of collectivised forms of self exploitation – groups of workers being their own capitalists?
I have heard of some forms of self employment being described in Party circles as almost a disguised forms of wage labour. The small shopkeeper, for example , though nominally self employed is in reality multifariously employed as a glorified salesperson on commission for the corporations whose wares she stock in the her little corner shop. In the UK there are 4.8 million self-employed which accounts for around 15% of the working population.
There is also the wider question of the “informal sector” in the Global South especially. As mentioned this is the largest chunk of the global workforce and comprises about 60% of the global workforce. The informal sector encompasses both self employed individuals such as street hawkers or individuals providing a service e.g. shoe shine boys , informal tourist guides etc as well as small family run businesses largely operating outside of government regulation and control
The formal sector based on the traditional wage labour contract with the attendant rights and duties this entails is comparatively small. In India for example it is about 20 % of the workforce and is subject to erosion by contracting out or outsourcing production to the informal sector
All these developments pose massive questions for how we conceptualise the process of capitalist exploitation. It is something we need to pay much closer attention to in our literature
robbo203 wrote: “All these developments pose massive questions for how we conceptualise the process of capitalist exploitation. It is something we need to pay much closer attention to in our literature” [my bold]
I’d also add ‘who’ socialists are conceptualising for (is it for workers, or for academics?), and ‘why’ the conceptualising is done in such an alienating way (is it meant to keep workers out of the debate?).
To bring Marx into our critical focus, regarding translations, who is Capital written for, why is Capital so difficult to understand, and how can we in the 21st century make Capital answer the ‘who’ and ‘why’ questions?
It is something we need to pay much closer attention to. ‘Conceptualisation’ precedes activity. Marx argued for theory and practice, not for the other way around.
I know our declaration of principles is a historical document and all that (though slightly edited) but it makes no mention of a difference between productive and unproductive workers, and rather gives the impression, rightly or wrongly, that all workers are productive:
“That in society, therefore, there is an antagonism of interests, manifesting itself as a class struggle between those who possess but do not produce and those who produce but do not possess.”
Nor do the explanatory notes. They don’t even use the word exploitation. There is a paragraph about surplus value but without actually calling it such or mentioning specifically that only some workers produce it.
“The workers in the factory…are directly connected to the production. It is the labour of these workers (including the plant management) that creates the profits that keep the capitalists rich. It is vital that the capitalists pay their workers less than the value that their labour produces. It is this difference between the value of what workers are paid and the value of what they produce that is the source of profit.”
And according to the wording of the membership questionnaire there is no requirement for new members to appreciate any difference between productive and unproductive workers.
So we don’t seem to think that appreciating such a difference is a prerequisite for becoming a socialist and wanting to abolish capitalism, and theoretically a majority could establish socialism without having the first idea about any difference. So in what sense is it important? And if it is important to differentiate between different kinds of worker, is it important enough to mention it in our D of P and other publications? Isn’t it simply enough to understand that all workers, whether teachers, professors, council workers, shop workers, factory workers, civil servants, the self employed, and indeed pensioners, are trapped in the capitalist system and have a common interest in abolishing it?
Isn’t it simply enough to understand that all workers, whether teachers, professors, council workers, shop workers, factory workers, civil servants, the self employed, and indeed pensioners, are trapped in the capitalist system and have a common interest in abolishing it?
I’m inclined to agree with what you say, Rod, but on other hand we are burdened with this historical legacy that seems to place the exploitation of productive labour at the heart of the wage labour-capital relationship that defines capitalism. Exploitation is narrowly equated with the production of surplus value.
This is a line of argument that people like Zac Cope, who I have mentioned several times on this thread, seem to take. The implication is that those who are not engaged in productive wage labour producing surplus value are not exploited which in turn leads to absurd propositions such as the one Cope makes, that the entire working class of the developed countries are labour aristocratic and as such have a common interest in joining with their capitalist employers in exploiting the workers in the Global South. The effect of this is to blur the class distinction and to detract from the class struggle within the developed countries themselves.
I would submit that most workers in the West dont feel like they are some sort labour aristocratic elite living the life of Reilly off the backs of workers in the Global South. Since the 1970s things have got significantly worse in relative terms. Years of austerity and stagnant wage growth, notwithstanding significant increases in productivity, have contributed to a widespread feeling that we are being increasingly short-changed in a world of growing financial pressures, mounting debts and a steadily widening gulf between rich and poor
We need to redefine what we mean by exploitation in the narrow sense of productive workers generating surplus. For sure this is the beating heart of capitalist system of exploitation but the body politic of capitalism consists of more than just the heart. It consists too of all those other organs which interact with the heart and enable the system to live and grow.
We need to be more explicit in naming and drawing attention to, them
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