Unproductive labour and exploitation
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robbo203 wrote: “LBird, the political purpose of saying that some workers do not produce surplus value but are financed out of surplus value is to show that there are structural limits to what reformism can achieve.” [my bold]
Thank you for an answer to my question, robbo.
But you’ll already know that I’ve said a number of times on this thread that I agree with you ‘that there are structural limits to what reformism can achieve‘.
My point is that this political purpose can be achieved much more simply and closer to ‘ordinary sense’ by simply using the analogy of the operation of a pair of lungs, with which every worker is already physically familiar.
That is, simply say ‘Keynesian reformism can’t work because capitalism always contracts, and so reforms are removed‘. That is, the ‘structural limit’ is the working of capitalism.
Neither you nor any other poster has explained why this simple explanation needs to be replaced with a far more complex ‘explanation’ involving, not just unfamiliar terminology, but downright contradictory, non-intuitive, complex terms like ‘unproductive labour’ (which even youse here say is productive – but which just isn’t productive for yet another concept which is not commonly used). Plus, ‘unproductive’ is morally-loaded, no matter what your protestations are.
My other main question, which also hasn’t been answered, is: ‘Who is the audience for which this concept of ‘unproductive labour’ is aimed?‘.
If you simply answer ‘academics’, that’s fine by me.
But then, I’ll just ask ‘Why?’.
‘Why academics and not workers, who are supposed to be who socialists are interested in influencing?’
To go back to Charlie’s original concept: when a direct producer was going to market, or doing their accounts, they weren’t making anything, that was sunken time away from production of wealth.
Now, part of that may have been an attempt on Marx’ part to demonstrate that the capitalist class itself was not productive, and did not add value, so even where agents/employees do the work of the capitalist, going to market and doing accounts, they must remain unproductive.
This is attractive to those who want to talk of a ‘middle class’ and thus exclude those who do not directly produce surplus value from the working class.
Perhaps by way of analogy we can clarify the situation: chattel slavery is built on the extraction of surplus, not surplus value, that surplus gets transformed into value in the market later. The slaves in the fields produced the crop that would be sold, the house slaves most certainly did not, indeed, they did not produce any surplus. they were still essential to the slave holders operations, and they could not have run the plantation without the house slaves.
Nonetheless, the house slaves were still slaves, and still exploited by the slave system.
Thanks for your reply, YMS.
YMS wrote: “To go back to Charlie’s original concept…Now, part of that may have been an attempt on Marx’ part to demonstrate…“.
As I suggested earlier, one form of reply to my question would be to argue from authority. And I’ve already given my reply.
LBird wrote: “My reply would be … If he did, Marx was mistaken…”
I think Marx is very useful, but in the 21st century, nearly 137 years after his death, and with us socialists having had no success whatsoever in building socialism amongst the proletariat, I think it is necessary to critically engage with Marx’s ideas. Sometimes he is plain wrong, sometimes he expresses himself very unclearly, sometimes he contradicts himself, and sometimes he is right, but needs re-writing for a modern audience. I’m sure you can think of other reasons to do this.
YMS wrote: “This is attractive to those who want to talk of a ‘middle class’…“.
So, are you saying that the political purpose of employing the term ‘unproductive labour’ is to persuade academics, who regard themselves as ‘middle class’, to change their political and ideological views?
That is, the audience for the concept ‘unproductive labour’ is not workers? If so, again, that’s fine by me.
But… why would robbo, and anyone else employing this term, spend their valuable time arguing with academics who aren’t going to agree with democratic socialists, whose main categories are ‘proletariat’, ‘bourgeoisie’ and ‘petit-bourgeoisie’ (non-property owners, big property owners and small property owners), about our views of a ‘middle class’ (a Weberian, not a Marxist, category, which Weber intended to obscure ‘class’ as an exploitative relationship)?
Why wouldn’t robbo just challenge Cope’s categories (and underlying, often unconscious, political assumptions, theories, methods, philosophy, ideology)?
I still don’t see the political purpose of the category ‘unproductive labour’. It’s usage can only damage our political efforts.
Clipping out the bits where I actually go back to the basic concept to explain that to then claim I’m arguing by authority is hardly friendly discussion, especially when that is the exact opposite of what I was doing.
As for:
“So, are you saying that the political purpose of employing the term ‘unproductive labour’ is to persuade academics, who regard themselves as ‘middle class’, to change their political and ideological views?”
No, I’m saying the swans fly over Vienna at midnight, I thought that was plain enough.
Productive and unproductive are useful concepts when discussing useful work versus useless toil, and especially when we can show that productive labour is useless,
Ahhh, I thought you’d struggle to keep it civil, YMS – nice to be proved right, once again!
Anyway, as you simply echo what’s already been said:
YMS wrote: “Productive and unproductive are useful concepts when discussing useful work versus useless toil, and especially when we can show that productive labour is useless,” [my bold]
I’ll simply ask once again, who defines ‘unproductive’ as ‘useless toil’?
Surely even thinkers with your ideological views can see that calling any worker’s work ‘useless toil’ is making a moral judgement about their labour, which can only alienate them from socialist politics?
I was going to write ‘from our politics’, but I’m not convinced that you are a democratic communist. You never mention either ‘democracy’ or ‘communism’ in your discussions. I’m inclined to think that you see yourself as some sort of ‘expert academic’, who has an access to ‘reality’ (like supposedly ‘unproductive labour’) which can’t be done by an ordinary worker.
If you are one of these ‘experts’ (sic), no wonder my questioning annoys you!
This is a good read :
https://www.marxists.org/archive/morris/works/1884/useful.htm
Great title too.
To briefly expose my ideology, I am a Jethroist Tullist Flautist, and the main tennets of Jethroism Tullism Flautism are famous and need no further elaboration.
I think the obvious answer of who finds the work unproductive and useless is the people doing that work, and as for alienating workers who do useless work, Shirley, the useless work itself should be a motivation for socialism and we should help clarify that there is a means to end that toil? Demonstrating that although a type of work might be profitable for capitalists it might not contribute to neither the happiness of the worker nor anyone they know’s also adds grist to the scrocialist mill.
Just to underline the importance of understanding and contesting notions of “productivity”, I’m just ploughing through a history of the Holocaust which notes that notions of “overpopulation” and productive population predominated in the Nazi ideology regarding moving (and reducing the population of Europe: essentially for what we would call primary accumulation). They even managed to classify informal and household labour as unproductive mouths to feed, because it didn’t contribute to capital accumulation and savings. And, of course, this notion of “overpopulation” and optimum productivity was itself a means of masking the real underlying cause of poverty in capitalistic production relations (they did, however, look to Stalin’s forced collectivisation as a model of how to resolve the ‘rural crisis’).
Of course, this is the apogee of alienation, of seeing people made to fulfil the abstract ecojnomic model, rather than looking to human need.
As to productivity and surplus value, it is worth noting that as capitalist relations of production develop, so prices diverge more and more from value, and a given firm will be realising surplus value produced at an entirely different firm, as production, productivity and division of labour become more pronounced it becomes impossible to say who contributed what to the economic output, and this gives grist to our mill of abolishing the need for money and pricing altogether, replacing it with co-operative production for needs.
Finally, I’d just like to mention democracy and communism.
Indeed, that’s just the book I’m reading, and it specifically mentions the demographic economics the Nazis pioneered.
This all has contemporary resonances:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/51560120
Patel claims there are 8.5 economically inactive potential workers in the UK, but if the Tories are determined to restrict immigration and compel British citizens to come out of retirement, then an Aufheben style ‘refusal of work’ campaign becomes a sensible strategy.
Finally, I’d just like to mention democracy and communism.
The gunman who shot dead at least 10 people was a far-right eugenicist
The justification for killing entire populations was made in “explicitly eugenicist terms”
I’ve been doing some reading around the question of the informal economy versus the formal economy. It ties in with the question of productive versus unproductive labour since according to Marx’s definition of “productive labour” – productive from the point of view of capital in the sense that it contributes to the expansion and accumulation of capital – the great majority of people working in the informal economy (and we are talking here mainly of people in the global South) would NOT be productive in this narrow technical sense. Meaning they would not be generating surplus value
This is apparent from Marx’s discussion of the role of independent peasants and handicraftsmen “who employ no labourers and therefore do not produce as capitalists”. He seems to advance the idea that:
“The independent peasant or handicraftsman is cut up into two persons*. As owner of the means of production he is capitalist; as labourer he is his own wage-labourer. As capitalist he therefore pays himself his wages and draws his profit on his capital; that is to say, he exploits himself as wage-labourer, and pays himself, in the surplus-value, the tribute that labour owes to capital” (Theories of Surplus Value part 4)
But then offers this criticism of that idea
‘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
Consequently with regard to the products they produce:
In this capacity 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 it has nothing to do with the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, which depends entirely on whether the labour is exchanged for money or for money as money as capital. They therefore belong neither to the category of productive nor of unproductive labourers, although they are producers of commodities. But their production does not fall under the capitalist mode of production.
The point that I am making here is that this could well describe the situation for a very large chunk of the workforce of the “developing economies” – the Global South. For it is in this part of the world the informal sector is the dominant sector in terms of the numbers of workers it represents. For instance, in India the formal sector employs only about 10 % of the nation’s workforce – 48 million of India’s 472 million economically active people – in the financial year 2011/12, the vast majority working in the informal sector according to this source (https://www.dandc.eu/en/article/indias-informal-sector-backbone-economy)
Now the informal sector which as stated is far larger than the formal sector in the developing countries consists of 2 main subsectors
- self-employment and unpaid family work
- insecure and unregulated wage labour or paid employment
According to this source:
In the developing countries, self-employment and unpaid family work are more important, and paid employment is less important, than in the developed countries. The shares of working people who earn their livelihoods in these ways are more than 80% of women and 70% of men in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, more than 50% of both men and women in East and Southeast Asia, and more than 30% in the Middle East and North Africa and in Latin America and the Caribbean (Kucera and Roncolato, 2008). The ILO combines the self-employed and unpaid family workers into a category they call “vulnerable employment.” Vulnerable employment accounts for half of the world’s employment, with rates ranging from 77% in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa to 32% in Latin America and the Middle East to 10% in the developed economies and the European Union (ILO, 2009). (https://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1151&context=workingpapers)
And this source:
As noted earlier, the informal economy is comprised of both self-employment in informal enterprises (i.e., small and/or unregistered) and wage employment in informal jobs (i.e., without secure contracts, worker benefits or social protection). In developing regions, self-employment comprises a greater share of informal employment outside of agriculture (and even more inside of agriculture) than wage employment: specifically, self-employment represents 70 per cent of informal employment in sub-Saharan Africa, 62 per cent in North Africa, 60 per cent in Latin America and 59 per cent in Asia. If South Africa is excluded, since black-owned businesses prohibited during the apartheid era have only recently been recognized and reported, the share of self-employment in informal employment increases to 81 per cent in sub-Saharan Africa.
Informal wage employment is also significant in developing countries, comprising 30 to 40 per cent of total informal employment (outside of agriculture). Informal wage employment is comprised of employees of informal enterprises as well as various types of informal wage workers who work for formal enterprises, households or no fixed employer(https://www.un.org/en/ecosoc/meetings/2006/forum/Statements/Chen%27s%20Paper.pdf)
Capitalism (and its productive/unproductive labour distinction) is unquestionably the predominate mode of production on the planet today. But is useful to understand that it coexists with what are essentially non- or pre-capitalist modes of production even if it completely dominates and even exploits the latter for its own purposes.
For instance, since the 1970s and the start of neoliberalism when big corporations started to outsource and contract out manufacturing to the global south (where 80 percent of the global industrial workforce now reside) in order to focus more on stuff like the branding of commodities at the high end of value chain, I suspect some of this work contracted out is not just to be found in the so called “export processing zones” of developing countries which would presumably fall mainly under the heading of the ” formal sector”. Some of it would also presumably have been subcontracted out to the much larger informal sector ( a bit like the “putting out” system that operated at the start of England’s Industrial revolution when the processing of textile products was still largely a cottage industry and merchants went round the homes of rural workers dropping off raw materials and picking up finished products)
The “self employment/unpaid family labour” aspect would, of course, be more obvious in the case of peasant production and the sale of food commodities that enter into the capitalist value chain e.g. via rural cooperatives in the developing countries
I haven’t read it myself but apparently this book gives a good general overview of the many ways in which the informal economy connects with and serve the interests of the formal capitalist economy – though the book itself is a bit dated
World Underneath: The Origins, Dynamics and Effects of the Informal Economy (1989)
Let’s hope that those in the sector don’t feel insulted at being called “informal” or, for that matter, those in the formal sector at being called “formal”.
As I had said it several times, for me, Karl Marx is more than enough until now he has been the only one who has accurately described Capitalism, the rest are just innovators. Richard Wolff is one of them, he said that he has read Marx economic, and he calls himself a Marxist economist, but at the end, he always distorts Marx
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