robbo203
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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
I have been wading through Cope’s book making notes as I go along. This passage sums up the argument he advances and demonstrates how heavily he relies on the implicit assumption that unproductive workers cannot be exploited because they do not produce surplus value. Since the size of the unproductive sector in the Global North is so large (and the size of the productive sector so correspondingly small) it follows , according to Cope, that it depends on the transfer of value from the global south to the global north via the mechanisms of export capital (and repatriated profits) and unequal exchange. In other words, the working class as a whole in the Global North is a net recipient of surplus value rather than producer of it and to that extent is indistinguishable from the capitalists, depending upon the super-exploitation of the workers in the global South where the overwhelming bulk of the productive workforce reside:
“It is the unavoidable conclusion of the present work that the profits of the capitalist class in the OECD (that is, the “top i%” fixated on by social democrats of various stripes) are entirely derived from the superexploitation of the non-OECD productive workforce. Whilst the above calculations indicate that no net profits are generated by the OECD (productive) working class (in the absence of superprofits, these would be completely nullified), there is, however, the matter of the wages of the OECD’s unproductive workforce to consider. Since our estimates of transferred superprofits do not cover the reproduction costs of OECD unproductive labour-power as well as profits, but only the latter, it may appear that the surplus value generated by OECD productive workers goes in its entirety to pay the wages of the unproductive OECD workforce. Even assuming that the wages of unproductive workers in the OECD are paid for out of surplus value generated by the productive workers in the OECD, it is clear that the OECD working class tout court receives the full value of its labour and is, to that extent, a bourgeois working class. Yet it must be understood that whilst the present work does not prove that OECD productive workers do not produce surplus value, it also does not prove that they do. In fact, were OECD profits to be wholly negated through equal remuneration of labour globally, according to equivalent “productivity” and wage levels, there would be a precipitate decline in nominal OECD GDP. Capitalism would collapse utterly, at least in the OECD countries. Given such a scenario, it is scarcely tenable to imagine that the tiny productive-sector working class in the OECD could possibly produce enough surplus value to pay the wages of the bloated unproductive sector. The conclusion reached here, moreover, follows from calculations which are almost certainly overly generous to the First Worldist position, despite demonstrating that the entirety of net profits in the OECD is derived from imperialism. A more reasonable account (one less friendly to First Worldist prejudices) would surmise that if around 80% of the worlds productive labour is performed in the Third World by workers earning less than 10% of the wages of First World workers, that provides not only the profits of the haute bourgeoisie in the OECD, but also the economic foundation for the massive expansion of retail, administration and security services.”
P207-8
Alan,
I think the term “Third World” was introduced in 1950s by a French political scientist (whose name I forget) and popularised by the British sociologist Peter Worsley. It was intended to distinguish this bloc from the first world and the second world (the soviet bloc et al). I am guessing the distinction between developing world and developed world came into fashion shortly after that. The rise of dependency theorists in the 1970s/80s also introduced another term – underdevelopment. The developed core countries were said to systemically block development and industrialisation in the peripheral countries – thus “underdeveloping” them and forcing them to rely on the export of low value primary goods – agricultural and mining products – for processing in the industrialised countries . The Dependency school of thought was proved wrong by the rise of the “Newly Industrialising countries” -another term – exemplified by the Asian Tiger economies like South Korea, Taiwan etc. and of course China. The global north/global south distinction tends to be the terminology currently in use but is confusing for obvious reasons
LBird
I take your point about the term unproductive labour sounding a bit pejorative but remember this is the term Marx himself used as an analytical category with which to examine the workings of the capitalist economy. Marx made it very clear that by unproductive labour he was not suggesting that the work involved was not useful. All he was saying was that it detracted from the production of surplus value since it was financed out of surplus value. The larger the component of unproductive labour in the workforce, the less surplus value there was available for reinvestment as capital and the expanded reproduction of capital. This was an argument Marx derived directly from Adam Smith and I think the productive/unproductive distinction is not only legitimate but quite significant as a way of understanding developments in capitalism (though neoclassical bourgeois economists deny this).
Here is a link to Marx.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm
Note his comment: “Only the narrow-minded bourgeois, who regards the capitalist form of production as its absolute form, hence as the sole natural form of production, can confuse the question of what are productive labour and productive workers from the standpoint of capital with the question of what productive labour is in general, and can therefore be satisfied with the tautological answer that all that labour is productive which produces, which results in a product, or any kind of use value, which has any result at all”
That is, there is an unbreakable link between ‘surplus value’ and ‘exploitation’. One can’t ‘exist’ without the other. It’s hard to think of ‘exploitation’ not producing ‘surplus value’ (surely that’s what makes it ‘exploitation’), and likewise think of ‘surplus value’ not being produced by ‘exploitation’
The problem with this, LBird, is that if you assume there is an “unbreakable link” exploitation and the production of surplus value then where does that leave workers who do not produce surplus value in Marx’s account? Are they not therefore exploited? I would say they are and the fact that they are unproductive has got nothing to do with it.
You ask why then differentiate between ‘productive’ and supposedly ‘unproductive’? Marx actually talked of workers being “productive” in the sense that you probably have in mind – that is, productive of use values. But he also used the term productive in another more specific sense – productive of surplus value . He argued that surplus value was peculiar or unique to capitalism, in other kinds of class society the economic surplus takes other forms
So contrary to what you say its actually quite easy to think of ‘exploitation’ not producing ‘surplus value’. In feudalism the serfs were exploited but they did not produce surplus value. I mention this because of there are some strands of Marxism like the (late) analytical Marxist G A Cohen who insisted that Marx’s labour theory of value has little bearing on the question of exploitation (Cohen himself seems to have regarded capitalist exploitation as not dissimilar to feudal exploitation)
In a sense you are correct. The production of surplus value lies at the capitalist exploitation. But is only a necessary not a sufficient condition of the latter. This is because surplus value has to be realised in circulation and for that you need unproductive workers. Capitalism without unproductive workers in this sense would simply not be able to function.
Why I am banging about this? Its because I think the matter has quite significant implications. Cope and his ilk are arguing that in effect the workers of the Global North are not exploited but constitute a “labour aristocracy” and that, in effect, their material interests are aligned with the metropolitan capitalists in exploiting the low paid workers of the global South. This is a surprisingly common sentiment and flourishes among handwringing liberals who go on about how “we” in the “West” live such a privileged and pampered existence at the expense of the rest of the world. As if poverty doesn’t exist in the West and privilege doesn’t exist in the non-West.
One of the arguments Cope uses to support his thesis is precisely this argument about unproductive labour. The bulk of workers in the West are now unproductive -they dont produce surplus value – and we are invited to infer from this that they are therefore not exploited. Manufacturing in particular has been steadily relocated and outsourced to the global South over the past few decades. It is, thus, in the global South where more and more productive work is to be found and where wages are a fraction of the wages in the global North (Cope argues that this is not a reflection of differences in productivity and that such differences are far less than might be supposed)
There are many aspects of his argument which simply do not add up to my mind. But the important thing to note about it concerns what we can infer from what he is saying. Cope’s “Anti-imperialism” is emphatically positing that the basic cleavage in contemporary capitalist society as being not between the global working class and the global capitalist class but rather between what Lenin called the oppressor or imperialist countries and the oppressed countries. Obviously that is a view to which we would be fundamentally opposed!
Economical exploitation is extraction of surplus value, therefore, if unproductive labor is exploited they also produce surplus value
Well, not according to Marx. Marx is quite clear that unproductive workers dont produce surplus value. If that is the case and if unproductive workers are exploited, would it not be better to say exploitation involves any that enables the extraction of an economic surplus. This would cover both the direct producers of surplus value and unproductive workers
I’d advise you to define both your and his concepts, so that we have ‘robbo-unproductive-labour’ and ‘robbo-exploitation’, contrasted with ‘Cope-unproductive-labour’ and ‘Cope-exploitation’.
Well, I would go along with Marx in saying that unproductive labour is labour that does not produce surplus value but is paid for out of surplus value. Where I disagree with Cope is in his suggestion that unproductive labour is not exploited. Unproductive labour might not itself produce surplus value but it is necessary for the realisation of surplus value. Commodities dont sell themselves. Capitalism needs unproductive workers as well as productive workers. Both are part of the working class which encompasses all those who are obliged to sell their working abilities for a wage or salary in order to live and exploitation itself is a class wide phenomenon. It cannot be simply be understood in terms of a single business exploiting its own workforce. It is social and it applies to ALL workers whether they do unproductive work or productive work and whether they live in the global north or the global south
If you take his assumptions, theories and concepts without critical examination, you’ll fail to see the weaknesses of his ‘argument’.
I can assure you that’s exactly what I am not doing – taking his assumptions etc without critical examination. I am particularly concerned with his argument about unproductive labour and exploitation and already have noted a number of inconsistences if not downright contradictions in what he has to say. If people here want to look at the argument go to the link below. I suggest focus on Part 2 – Global Value Transfer and Stratified Labour Today” – which gets to the heart of the argument. Much of the rest is just sociologising.
It is evidently a key book in the so called anti-imperialist milieu and in some respects deeply hostile to the outlook of revolutionary socialism. It is a worth a read for that very reason.
https://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/books/Economics/DividedWorldDividedClass_ZakCope.pdf
LBird I am simply using Marx’s definition of productive workers as follows without making any assumptions
From volume I of Capital: ‘That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus value for the capitalist, and who thus works for the self expansion of capital…Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of product, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value”
I understand the point you are making about the inherent difficulty of “objectively” measuring surplus value. You cannot measure abstract labour in the way that you can concrete labour with a stop watch. It is a constantly shifting industrial average which only reveals itself, so to speak, in aposteriori fashion in the exchange ratios of commodities – their prices – in the long run
Cope’s argument is that GDP based figures, which are measurable, conceal or obscure the value transfers that are happening through global spatial economy and that differential productivity rates between groups of workers in different parts of the world are thoroughly misleading precisely they are couched in terms of value added to GDP. Yes, we can infer from pure theory that workers in more capital intensive industries are more productive (and hence more highly paid) than in labour intensive industries and that there will be a redistribution of surplus value from the latter to the former via the tendency for profit rates to equalise. But how exactly one is supposed to measure all this I cannot see. Yet his argument depends on being able to measure this “value transfer” from the global south to global north which he says cannot be done using GDP data
Isn’t this another expression of the Leninist “aristocracy of labour” where those in the developed world are bribed by imperialism to hold a complacent view about Third World exploitation.
Yes but Lenin’s labour aristocracy theory did not deny that workers in the developed capitalist countries were exploited. Cope’s theory on the other hand does and on the grounds that workers there are the net recipients of value rather than creators of value
I am still trying to figure out Cope’s reasoning for this. He claims for example that through the mechanism of unequal exchange when ” goods enter into imperialist-country markets, their prices are multiplied several fold, sometimes by as much as 1,000%.” On the face of it that seems to suggest that workers the “imperialist-country markets” will need substantially higher incomes to afford these products anyway by comparison with the “oppressed countiries” – to use Leninspeak – where they are available at a fraction of the price.
