robbo203
Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
‘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?
.
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
The other point you make is that productive (of surplus value) labour is not all that widespread in the countries Cope refers to (you mention 20% as the percentage of the workforce in the “formal sector” in India and that will include many who don’t produce surplus value). Since he claims to adhere to the same definition as Marx of “productive labour” this rather undermines his case as stated by you (not read him myself) as I would think it could be open to doubt that more surplus value is produced in the so-called “Global South” than in the developed capitalist countries.
Adam
I should perhaps qualify what I said about Cope in that he does concede that some workers in the developed countries “might” produce surplus value but insofar as they do this thus surplus value, he suggests, is entirely used to finance the unproductive sector so that in effect both the capitalists and the workers in the developed countries live off the superprofits generated by the exploited workers in the global south.
On the question of the informal sector versus the formal sector I wouldn’t want to suggest that productive labour is limited exclusively to the latter in the Global South. Though clearly a huge chunk of the informal sector is unproductive I am not quite sure to what extent “supply chain capitalism” (as it is called) penetrates into the informal sector through arrangements such as subcontracting and outsourcing (no doubt based on piece work – what Marx described as the most ruthless form of wage exploitation). The historical equivalent in the UK would be the cottage industry and the “putting out system” involving agents travelling around rural communities providing rural families with the raw material to transform into finished goods (textile products) to be sold in the urban markets for a profit.
This preceded the emergence of large scale production – the industrial revolution – in the shape modern factory system that we associate with the formal sector. But these days the formal sector in the global south is incapable of providing employment for the vast numbers of unemployed or underemployed workers there (notwithstanding the shift in manufacturing to the global south). So something like a cottage industry system seems to have sprung up around the formal sector to serve its needs in the form of sweatshop labour etc
So, surely the adherents of the ‘unproductive/productive’ dichotomy would have to argue that these millions of ‘unproductive’ workers at least hampered, and at worst hamstrung, the US capitalist economy. But, without these millions, how would the US capitalist economy have expanded and have come to dominate all others?
You are still missing the point LBird. Nobody is saying the unproductive sector is not necessary for capitalism to function effectively, only that unproductive sector does not generate surplus value. But capitalism needs MORE than just workers producing surplus value, It also needs workers to realise surplus value at the point of sale. And it needs to workers to perform the various functions of the state. You cannot operate capitalism without a state
But as Adam points out the usefulness of the unproductive/productive dichotomy is that it enables us to see that there are limits to the size that the unproductive sector can grow before the economy starts feeling the pinch. This is because the unproductive sector is financed out of the productive sector and the smaller the latter becomes in relation to the former the less surplus value there is available for capitalisation. In short the competitive accumulation of capital – the driving force of capitalism – starts to get choked off and the rate of profit starts to decline. We can see evidence of this in the long term secular decline of economic growth rates in countries like the US
That at any rate is the argument behind Fred Moseley’s book. The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy., (1992) which you might want to read up on. The point is that from capitalism’s point of view there is an optimal ratio in the proportions of the productive and unproductive workers in the economy (though this optimum can shift as circumstances change). Too much or too little of one vis a vis the other can have adverse consequences for the economy and in some ways the whole neoliberal project can be seen as a (failed) attempt to prune the unproductive part of the economy as represented by the state sector which the high priests of neoliberalism saw as being bloated and excessive in size. Hence Thatcher’s “rolling back the state” mantra
I dont think it is necessary for workers to understand the ramification of the unproductive/productive dichotomy but it is useful in the same way that Marx’s labour theory of value or his materialist conception of history is useful. Workers can establish a socialist society without any familiarity with these theories at all but understanding them helps
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
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
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
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
Ah yes and I forgot include the (very Leninist ) conclusions Cope draws from the passage quoted above
“By the foregoing measures, then, there is absolutely no reason to suppose that the average OECD worker has any material stake in anti-imperialism. As Emmanuel astutely remarked:
If by some miracle, a socialist and fraternal system, regardless of its type or model, were introduced tomorrow morning the world over, and if it wanted to integrate, to homogenise mankind by equalising living standards, then to do this it would not only have to expropriate the capitalists of the entire world, but also dispossess large sections of the working class of the industrialised countries, of the amount of surplus-value these sections appropriate today. It seems this is reason enough for these working classes not to desire this “socialist and fraternal” system, and to express their opposition by either openly integrating into the existing system, as in the United States of America or the Federal Republic of Germany, or by advocating national paths to socialism [sic], as in France or Italy.101
In fact, the metropolitan working class has struggled to preserve its affluence politically within the imperialist state structure and has adopted concomitant ideologies of national, racial and cultural supremacy, including, but certainly not limited to, a complacent and conservative self-regard. As capitalist oligopolies come to dominate global production, workers in the dominant nations are able to secure better life prospects through their monopoly of jobs paying wages supplemented by superprofits”So basically according to Cope , we’re stuffed. Workers in the global north are not going to opt for socialism (cos its in their material interests to stick with the capitalist exploitation of the global south). And workers in the global south will presumably be too preoccupied in in engaging in so called national liberation struggles – linking arms with their own capitalists – against imperialism to be concerned with expressing solidarity with their brothers and sisters in the north who have grown fat at their expense.
Anyway, you can see now why this issue that I have raised in this raised is actually of quite fundamental importance and need to be addressed
