ALB
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Rod, the point of distinguishing between labour that producing surplus value and labour that doesn’t isn’t, and never was, to draw an invidious distinction between different members of the working class. Not at all. It is to understand the workings of capitalism.
As capitalism is a system of capital (as value) accumulation out of surplus value its priority is employing productive-of-surplus-value labour. This is another way of saying that capitalism is a system in which profits come first. As the ABC of Marxism and Robbo have pointed out, it sets limits to the amount of labour the state can organise to provide “public services” (education, health, libraries, museums, meals on wheels, rubbish collection, etc) as this has to come out of surplus value and in fact is at the expense of producing it, and is why when profits fall or threaten to fall then state spending on services that people benefit from are cut back.
I agree that to be a socialist you only need to understand that capitalism cannot work, and cannot be made to work, in the interests of “the many” without necessarily understanding exactly why; it’s a conclusion that can be drawn on the basis of experience. However, the party should be in a position to explain why, and the distinction between labour that produces surplus value compared with that which doesn’t is crucial to this,
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.
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.
The A to Z of Marxism (an updated version of which was put up on this site last week) has this to say under “Productive and unproductive labour”
Productive and in productive labour. Productive labour is that employment which creates surplus value for the capitalist, whereas unproductive labour does not. For example, a chef employed by a capitalist to work in his hotel is productive, whereas if that same chef were employed to work in the capitalist’s home they would be unproductive. Nowadays, though, most unproductive labour is carried out in the state sector of the economy.
The distinction is useful for analysing the structure of capitalism. For instance, it sets theoretical limits for the size of the state sector of the economy, since this must be paid out of the surplus value arising from productive labour. No judgement is implied on the importance or worth of either type of work and the working class carries out both productive and unproductive labour.
Reading S. Savran & E. Tonak, ‘Productive and Unproductive Labour: An Attempt at Clarification and Classification’, Capital & Class, 1999
I don’t know why he calls himself an anarchist since he clearly isn’t. In fact in this interview he undermines the whole anarchist case that self-styled “direct action” alone is sufficient to get reforms. As he points out, you also need a sympathetic administration to consolidate them, which has to be voted in. In other words, if you want reforms, the best strategy is a two-pronged one of both direct and electoral action — that is, if your goal is some reform as in practice is the immediate goal of nearly all anarchists. If you will the end, you’ve got to will the means. He’s being logical, they are not. It also the best strategy to get socialism, where we are being logical and, once again, anarchists are not.
Chairman Mao may have promoted TCM (for others) because it was cheap but the present Chinese government promotes it because it is also a profitable export item. As an article in the September/October 2019 issue of the Skeptical Inquirer explained:
“Outside the WHO domain, the Chinese government is pursuing a similar agenda—TCM as an export product—by attempts to have an International Organization for Standardization (ISO) certification for, for example, TCM herbs and sterilization procedures for acupuncture needles (Dorlo and Timmerman 2009). These attempts fit the overall goal of the Chinese government to enlarge China’s herbal exports and to gain recognition for Chinese herbs, given that the Chinese herbs will never be able to receive a formal medical product registration for European or U.S. markets due to the “strict” requirements to demonstrate efficacy and safety. At this moment, ISO standards provide a false aura of reliability to thirty-three TCM products and “activities” of planting, from the sowing of ginseng seeds to an infrared moxibustion device, and another forty-three standards are in the making (International Organization for Standardization 2019). In a direct meeting between then WHO Director-General Margaret Chan and President Xi Jinping, the latter said straightforwardly that he counted on a good collaboration between China and WHO and that he expected the WHO would help with “promoting TCM and Chinese herbs to foreign countries.” The Chinese government lobbied Chan repeatedly while attempting to increase TCM’s acceptancy and suitability for export. This culminated, among other things, in the publication of purely commercial paid advertising supplements in Nature in 2011 and Science in 2014, in which the pseudoscientific articles received an approval in a preface written by then WHO Director-General Margaret Chan. (See David Gorski, “Science Sells Out: Advertising Traditional Chinese Medicine in Three Supplements,” Skeptical Inquirer, May/June 2015.) In 2017, the value of the growing Chinese export of medicinal herbs had peaked to $295 million (Cyranoski 2018).”
Chan, though not a Chinese subject, was a Chinese appointee and having someone who believed in TCM at the head of the World Health Organisation, for 10 years from 2007-2017, was like having a representative of Saudi Arabia as the head of the UN Commission on Human Rights.
Another article here, Alan?
This article from 1998, by a member of the World Socialist Party (India), deals with the question of whether the workers of one country exploit the workers of another and why wages are different in different countries:
I didn’t think they were going to be so stupid but apparently the Chinese authorities are promoting the unproven quack remedies of “Traditional Chinese Medicine” (Mumbo jumbo inherited from the pre-scientific past of medicine when virus were unknown) as a way to combat this new variety of the coronavirus;
They are using it as a complement to scientific medicine which of course will allow them to claim that any improvement is due at least in part to TCM whereas it will be due entirely to scientific medicine.
No wonder other countries want to get their citizens out of China. If I was there I would want to too.
I think you are right, Robbo, to point out that the concept of exploitation can be separated from that of producing surplus value. As you say, all previous class societies have been based on exploitation but without producing surplus “value”, only a surplus product directly appropriated by their exploiters.
This recalls the trick question in our Speaker’s Test: Do peasants produce surplus value? (not that you failed if you got the answer wrong ). The answer, if I remember, is that under feudalism as serfs they don’t and under capitalism, as peasant proprietors whose products are sold as commodities, they produce value but not surplus value. On the other hand, the slaves in the plantations of the southern USA produced surplus value because what they produced was sold on a market with a view to profit.
Be careful, comrade, you are running the risk of them accusing you of “left accommodationism” ! This is what they went on to say in that pamphlet of theirs Resisting Trumpist Reaction (and Left Accommodation):
“Other destructive politics arose from a single-minded, narrow anti-neoliberal “leftism” which insisted that neoliberalism is a greater threat to humanity than proto-fascism. In an interview with WGBH during the election season, Stein went so far as to declare that “[t]he answer to neofascism is stopping neoliberalism. Putting another Clinton in the White House will fan the flames of this right-wing extremism.” As one commentator shrewdly noted, her plan was to stop Trump by electing him president! Yet, despite the horrors of Trumpism we have experienced thus far, not to mention those that lie in wait, the notion that neoliberalism is a greater danger than Trumpism doggedly hangs on. ”
Hence their view that you should vote for “neo-liberalism” , i.e the status quo, as the lesser danger.
Here’s the MHI’s criticism of those who in the 2016 presidential elections either abstained or voted for the Greens:
”Varieties of “Leftist” Accommodation to Trumpism, and the Marxist-Humanist Alternative
A great many factors combined to hand Trump the presidency. A relatively small one, but one that may have been decisive in the election and may be decisive in the future, was accommodation to Trumpism among parts of the “left.”
One variant of soft-on-Trump “leftism” stems from the attitude that one should practice politics that make one feel good, without regard to its effect. Such people “righteously” refused to vote in a way that would have maximized the likelihood of Trump’s defeat, even in swing states that can—and did—decide the presidency. The number of votes cast for Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein in each of the three states that proved to be pivotal to Trump’s Electoral- College victory (Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) exceeded his margin of victory. In addition, an unknown number of people chose not to vote at all, taking to heart the message–– emanating from Stein and many supporters of Bernie Sanders––that Hillary Clinton was as bad as or worse than Trump.”There is no reason to think they would take a different attitude in the event of Sanders standing as an independent.
If the line-up is going to be Bloomberg v Trump I wonder what Chomsky, the MHI and the others will say. Silly question, they’ll say vote for Bloomberg, vote for cholera rather than the plague.
I am sure we have had this discussion before, haven’t we?
“Unproductive” (but “non-productive” might be a better description) workers, as those whose labour does not produce surplus value, can still be said to be exploited, only not for surplus value but in the sense of carrying out surplus labour.
The non-productive work that individual capitalist firms or the capitalist class as a whole has to have done to keep their system going, as to circulate commodities or for national and local government, costs them money, which they seek to minimise. One way to do this is for them to get those they employ in these tasks to work longer than is needed to replace the value of their labour power; which means that some of the work these workers do will be unpaid and reduce the cost of the work. These workers are being exploited for this unpaid, cost-saving labour.
The other way out of the dilemma is to argue that, as the costs of circulation and of government, are necessary from a capitalist point of view to keep the whole system going, the whole capitalist class is exploiting the whole working class without distinguishing between those who actually create surplus value and those who don’t. In other words, the work of the whole working class is necessary for the capitalist class to extract and share out surplus value.
Perhaps “socialism” isn’t that popular in the US if it’s a vote loser. Clearly it is popular amongst quite a wide section of the population but nowhere near a majority. Not that it is socialism in the proper sense of course, rather it is dissatisfaction with the private enterprise and so-called free market capitalism that used to be the unchallenged model of capitalism there. Not that’s necessarily a bad thing but it it would just be a beginning.
I don’t think there is a contradiction between the two statements. People hold religious views as individuals, ie on a personal basis. That so many people do literally “believe” without reference to the facts in one sort of religion or another is a social matter, a social problem.
Socialists oppose it because all religions are wrong in their assumptions just as, for instance, reformism and nationalism are and this impedes people coming to realise what they need to do to make this life (the only one we have) as good as possible.
