robbo203
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Not wanting to put a downer on things but I was just looking at the TV news today – in particular an item on the unfolding coronavirus probably soon-to-be pandemic if cases continue to grow in exponential fashion. If I understood things correctly I believe the Health Secretary or some other government flunkey mentioned something about introducing measures to contain the spread of the virus including banning all public meetings. (This might be size-dependent though – Switzerland has already banned all events with over 1000 people in attendance)
Obviously if this happens this could possibly have an impact on party activity including the Summer School. Have comrades made any contingency plans in case this happens?
I suggest keeping an ear to the ground and following what happens..
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”.
Can’t really see why anyone should feel insulted. The “informal sector” – the term itself was coined by British anthropologist Keith Hart in 1971 – simply refers to economic activities of either a market or non market kind that are not taxed and fall beyond the scope of government regulation or protection. By contrast, the formal sector, which by its very nature is exclusively market based, is taxed and does fall under government regulation
I’ve worked in both sectors at different times in my life as I’m sure have a lot of others on this list. I think it is useful to make these kinds of distinctions in order to put across a more realistic picture of contemporary capitalism. After all, lets not forget that a majority of workers in the world today actually work in the informal – not the formal – sector and this does have quite significant implications for these workers
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)
The comments section makes for interesting reading including this one for the statistical geeks
“All these prophets of doom saying it is a pandemic, there have been about 1200
deaths so far and the population is 7.7million. That is 0.0064166666666667%.
“We estimated an average of 389 000 (uncertainty range 294 000-518 000) respiratory deaths were associated with influenza globally each year during the study period, corresponding to ~ 2% of all annual respiratory deaths. Of these, 67% were among people 65 years and older”
Recent University of Edinburgh study.
By all means take precautions but no need to panic yet.”Of course, this virus is what the over-populationists have all been waiting for. A plague to wipe out the parasitical homo sapiens from the face of the Earth, well about 60% of us, at least.
I understand the mortality rate is only about 2% though…
I’m afraid to say it’s an ideological choice, and I know that all ‘materialists’ like to pretend that ‘reality itself’ is making their ‘choice’ for them, but I don’t share that delusion
Well, no, I think its much more straightforward than that, LBird. Did dinosaurs exist before human came into existence endowed with the ability to even think about dinosaurs as such? Yes or No? If “yes” (and I would be seriously concerned about your state of mind if you answered “no”) then I am afraid there can be no question of “ideological choice” about the matter. “Ideological choice” is a faculty of human beings and that faculty could not have been exercised at a time, millions of years ago, when there were no human beings around and dinosaurs roamed the earth.
It would be an ideological choice if we decided, as in the film Jurassic Park to clone them and bring em back to life but back then, millions of years ago, we could not possibly have made such choice ‘cos, like I say, we weren’t around to make it!
How we view dinosaurs – and even the term itself – may be “ideological” loosely speaking but you cannot possibly argue that the actual existence of dinosaurs was a matter of “ideological choice”. Lets be reasonable here. I mean, I go along with the drift of what youre basically saying – that science like any other field of human endeavour is broadly ideological in the sense that it is not, and can never be, “value free”. But I think you are going too far with your argument and overstepping the mark.
Unwittingly or not you seem to me to be substituting for, what you call Marx’s “idealism-materialism”, just pure idealism with this line of argument that nothing can exist without humans thinking of it when what you really mean to say is that the idea of something existing cannot exist without humans thinking of it. Which is a truism…..
Is the “we” the collective we as in the working class as a whole
Yes. Obviously, there is nothing we in the WSM can do about the contradiction referred to – empty homes alongside homeless people – though I would personally encourage people to squat if they can get away with it. Only when the working class as a whole becomes socialist-minded will we able to do something effective about getting rid of it by getting rid of the cause – capitalism.
The point I was making is that the contradiction exists in reality as an empirically demonstrable fact even if some of us may not be aware of it or dont care two hoots about it
‘Waiting for contradictions’ will lead to, as it always has, ‘waiting’.
Who’s waiting?
There are millions of empty housing units all around the world – 60 million in China alone 18 million in the US, 17 million in Europe and that’s not to mention all those office, factory, warehousing and retails units lying empty and decaying. At the same time there are millions of homeless people, tens of thousands of them living rough on the street
That’s a “contradiction”. We dont have to “wait” for it to materialise. It already exists. We need to act on it
“More recently, Sanders has argued that the U.S. is already “a socialist society” that redistributes national wealth to corporations through tax breaks and subsidies. “The difference between my socialism and Trump’s socialism is, I believe the government should help working families, not billionaires,” he said on Fox News Sunday.”
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. The need for profit has to take precedence over the need for reform when these two things come into sharp conflict as they will if the unproductive sector gets too bloated and the capitalists are burdened with mounting levels of taxation to pay for it. All they will do is move their capital elsewhere
What is the political purpose of employing the term ‘unproductive labour’?
Again, LBird, you keep on making this assumption that unproductive labour is a some kind of derogatory reference to workers classified as such. Its not. Unproductive labour in this context has a very specific, very narrow, meaning referring to labour that does not produce surplus value . It does NOT mean these same workers are not “productive” in the more ordinary sense of the term as meaning doing “useful work”
So long as you clarify what you mean by unproductive labour I really cannot see that there is any cause for concern whatsoever. You can use another term if you so chose but that does not diminish the importance of the concept itself and its relevance to understanding the workings of capitalism and the limitations of reformism imposed by the competitive need to accumulate capital out of surplus value.
It stands to reason that the more surplus value you divert towards the financing of the unproductive sector, the less surplus value you have available for capitalisation. Surely you can see the significance of this?
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robbo203 wrote: “The need to make profit via productive labour imposes limits on the extent of the unproductive sector – including state spending on the very reforms that the workers want the politicians to implement“.
Why mention ‘unproductive’? It’s more simple to say ‘The need to make a profit’ when combined with the contraction phase of capitalism ‘imposes limits on reforms’?No. The whole point of the unproductive sector is that it doesn’t produce surplus value but is financed out of surplus value produced by the productive sector. The larger the unproductive sector, the greater the share of surplus value that is diverted away from capitalisation or capital accumulation. You are thus in effect killing (or at any rate slowly strangling) the goose that lays capitalism’s golden eggs by spending too much on the unproductive sector . At some point this will make start to make a particular national economy less competitive . A negative feedback loop will then kick in. What will happen is “capital flight” in response to rising taxes to fund the unproductive sector. The capitalists will relocate their investment elsewhere . Your national economy will start going down the pan and so your capitalist state will feel obliged to start sharply pruning back on unproductive spending in a bid to attract back capital and restore a better balance between the size of the unproductive sector (which, though it is unproductive, is also useful up to a point from capitalism’s point of view) and the productive sector which has to take priority in capitalist terms
After all, Keynesian reformism does work… but only in the expansion phase of capitalism. The reforms must come to an end.
Does Keynesian reformism “work” or does it only appear to do so in the sense of being responsive to the contingent needs of capitalism at the time – notably, in the early post war era when capitalism was an in an expansive phase after the destruction of so much capital during the Second World War. If Keynesian reformism worked why did it end in such dismal failure? The whole point of the exercise was to moderate and even eliminate the capitalist trade cycle which it singularly failed to do.
I have been around factories workers, workers unions, office workers, retiree, peasants and professional workers and all of them consider that they are exploited by the capitalist class, for me, this is only an intellectual discussion.
But this is precisely why I raised the whole issue of unproductive labour and exploitation. I fully agree with you! Workers as a class – whether they be productive in the sense of producing commodities/surplus – or unproductive, are ALL exploited. Exploitation does not depends on you being in the productive sector of the capitalist economy
The point is that there are some people who say that unproductive workers are NOT exploited because they dont produce surplus value. Cope himself seems to think that becuase the unproductive sector in the developed capitalist economies is so large that this helps to explain why workers in this part of the world , in his opinion, are NOT exploited. He believes that the working class as a whole in the West is fully “labour aristocratic”, is not exploited as a class and has a vested material interest in supporting “imperialism” and the super -exploitation of workers in the global south.
I think Cope’s basic argument is absolute nonsense but it is view that is widely held among workers. All the more reason to deal with this argument about unproductive kabour and productive labour. It is not some arcane “intellectual discussion”. It has real world consequences and it is being used by the so called “anti -imperialist” brigade to promote ideas that are deeply divisive as far as the global working class is concerned
Do workers care about this? What is the importance of workers knowing about this?
Clearly workers dont care about this at the present time just as they dont care about socialism. But they DO care about what they can get out of capitalism and this often takes the form of supporting this or that politician or political party offering a platform of reforms. As socialists we hold that capitalism cannot be reformed in the interests of workers. Part of the explanation as to why this is the case lies precisely in this discussion we are having about the relationship between productive and unproductive labour which clearly shows the priority in capitalism is to make profits above everything else . The need to make profit via productive labour imposes limits on the extent of the unproductive sector – including state spending on the very reforms that the workers want the politicians to implement
