this post was submitted on 23 Sep 2024
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Calling service economy work unproductive labor isn't picking a weird corner of Marx's writing, it's completely misreading it.
The distinction in Marxism between productive/unproductive labour has nothing to do with producing things, the distinction is about whether the product of labour can be further profited off of, that is whether it can still be part of the M - C - M' cycle. According to the definition of unproductive labour, most "service industry" jobs today would fall into that category. Marxism doesn't actually have a "service industry" category and it does not use the capitalist categories of labour activity.
Productive labour: making a commodity to be sold later, or parts of commodities to be further laboured on and sold down the line. For example, making clothes, zippers, direct-to-TV movies, etc.
Unproductive labour: providing/selling a commodity or service for consumption. For example, massage therapy, selling roasted corn in the street, a plumber fixing a kitchen pipe, etc.
A bakery that bakes and sells bread to a customer is engaging in unproductive labour, while a bakery that sells to a store is engaging in productive labour.
I think in a marxist sense services are simply considered commodities: a product, though intangible, whose purpose for existing is to be bought and sold.
However, I think massage therapists and plumbers are productive because they create profit and thus accumulation of capital for their employer (or for themselves if they're self-employed).
We look at them from the POV of who hires their work, e.g. the client booking an appointment, but the rendering of services is what matters and what creates profit: a massage company charging 100$ for a massage and paying their therapist 60$ per massage makes a 40$ profit off every client, rendered possible by the therapist's labor.
The bakery in your example requires both types of labor: the bakers are productive because they imbue value in a commodity, but the cashiers are not because they don't directly create profit, they turn the value of the commodity into its money-form -- from what I understand of Cockshott's video "Are barristas productive?". If the bakers are also the cashiers as is often the case in this late-stage capitalism period, they perform both types of labor: some of it is productive, some of is unproductive.
We can take another example: a capitalist hiring a chef. In either cases, the chef produces a cooked meal with his labor-power. If the capitalist hires the chef to cook a meal for himself (and provided the chef didn't come through a temp agency or whatever else but was directly hired as they used to do back in Marx's days), then the labor was unproductive: it didn't generate more capital. If however the capitalist hires the chef for his restaurant, the labor is the exact same, but it becomes productive because the meal is sold for a profit.
You know what? I honestly don't know as much as I'd like about productive/unproductive labour as it applies to industries in general, and services in particular. So instead of coming up with some kind of half-baked answer I'll go and read about it.
I recommend Cockshott's video! He's a terf but he's a very good economist
I'll watch it. I also found a recent (2023) paper by two economists/Marxists in China, among other things.