Not all labor is produtive... according to capital
a reply to david harvie (not harvey)
Currently, I’m on vacation in Mexico city for a few days. I rarely leave Canada when it’s cold, so it’s nice to get out! Originally I wasn’t going to post anything, but I ended up having time in the morning to just covert an old reading response into something. Usually, when turning these essays into blog posts, I add some changes because my views usually change a lot. This
Productive Labor and Subjectivity
Karl Marx, in unpublished notes found in the appendix of the penguin edition of Capital, identifies what in the capitalist mode of production is categorized as productive versus unproductive labor (PUPL). Marx states labor is productive only if it creates “surplus-value directly, i.e., the only productive labor is that which is directly consumed in the course of production for the valorization of capital.”1
Capital objectifies labor to produce a “fluid quantum of value.”2 Within the labor process, the wage-laborer as living labor is “directly incorporated into the process of capital as a living factor” which both reproduces and augments the value of capital through the creation of surplus-value.3 Therefore, productive labor is “an abbreviation” for “socially determined labor,” i.e., labor engaged in a “specific relationship between the buyer and seller of labor”; in other words, capitalist value relations.4
Marx further critiques the common fetishism of confusing productive labor under capitalism with any labor that results in a product, service, use-value, or “anything at all.”5 As Marx states, “for labor to be designated productive, qualities are required which are utterly unconnected to the specific content of that labour” or the “material incarnations of these formal determinations or categories.”6 Instead, it is whether a labor process leads to the monetary valorization of capital, not its content, that decides its status as productive labor. Therefore, I would argue that value relations impose a specific subjectivity of productivity onto labor by deeming it productive only if it directly valorizes capital. The content of the labor process itself becomes detached from the goal of production, as labor productivity and capital valorization become two sides of the same coin.7
In my opinion, the specificity of the relations of subjectivity that capital places on labor is somewhat lost in David Harvie’s (not Harvey) rereading of Marx. Harvie argues that PUPL should be understood as an “open” category of class struggle.8 He argues that the substance of value, abstract labor, and its effects of alienating, imposing, and boundlessly subjugating living labor are colonizing all spheres of life.9 Students, teachers, parents, and especially gendered and racialized individuals engaged in unwaged reproductive labor are increasingly feeling the pressure of the logic of value creeping into their labor processes.10 As a result, Harvie argues that “all labor is productive” and produces value.11
While Harvie correctly identifies the increasing dominance of value logics and the necessity of social reproduction in all societies, he misses a central contradiction and irrationality of value and labor productivity that Marx is highlighting in his theories. Specifically, that the social formation of capital itself does not identify labor outside of its direct exploitation as productive. While some of the logic of abstract labor is increasingly imposed on labor processes outside capitalist production, they still do not produce value nor are they productive in the capitalist sense.
This is not a moral or political judgment of which labor is valuable based on its content, but how capital places a certain subjectivity on different forms of labor. All labor works to sustain capitalist social relations. However, only living labor whose subjectivity is directly subsumed under a relation of capitalist production valorizes capital and is productive according to value.
This is the irrationality of capital, that it only counts productive labor as that which produces directly for itself a monetary surplus, i.e., M-C-M’. Despite the fact that labor outside the immediate wage-relation is often fundementally necessary for the reproduction of society, an individual firm rarely cares for it. In fact, it will often push in the short term for social surplus to be divertred from say, familial care, putting pressure on the masses in order to increase profits. This actually touches on the role of the state, which is the only institution in capitalism which formally meant to take care of the “people” at large. It constantly has to deal with the outcries of how some workers are not seen as ‘productive’ and their labor is constantly disregarded.
This may seem overly pedantic; however, this precision helps to better understand the social relations of labor processes inside and outside the direct exploitation of capital. As Nancy Fraser argues, it is important to not reduce the “backstory” of relations of social reproduction, ecology, and politics that create the necessary conditions for valorization with valorization itself.12 By doing so, our analysis misses the unique ontologies and subjectivities that these labor processes outside the direct subsumption of capital engender.13
Under capitalism, not all labor is productive precisely because capital only counts labor which directly produces for it a monetary surplus. It has no regard for the content of the product, service, or labor process itself. It is a system that is deeply irrational in its rationality. However, it is precisely against this irrationality that Marx’s concept becomes a category open to class struggle. All laborers, whether in the moment considered productive or unproductive by capital, can fight against the irrational logic that has no regard for the content of their labor, for the “pain, suffering, human brutalisation, boredom, stupidity, that work may imply.” Only through understanding precisely the irrational logic of value can labor realize the necessity to abolish the practices and institutions that perpetuate its rule.
Works Cited
Fraser, Nancy. “7. Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode: For an Expanded Conception of Capitalism.” In _Critical Theory in Critical Times_, edited by Penelope Deutscher and Cristina Lafont, 141–59. Columbia University Press, 2017. https://doi.org/10.7312/deut18150-009.
Harvie, David. “All Labour Produces Value fr Capital and We All Struggle against Value.” _The Commoner_ 10 (January 1, 2005).
Marx, Karl. _Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy_. Translated by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach. V. 1: Penguin Classics. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981.
———. _Capital Volume 3: A Critique of Political Economy_. Translated by Ben Fowkes and David Fernbach. V. 1: Penguin Classics. London ; New York, N.Y: Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981.
Marx, Capital , 1981, 1038.
Marx, 1040.
Marx, Capital, 1981, 1040.
Marx, 1043.
Marx, 1039.
Marx, 1044-46.
Of course the extremety given in this discussion doesn’t mean that a thing doesn’t need to be a use-value, as Marx always states that’s the basis for it being a value. The point is at the abstract level, there’s no specific useful content that denotes whether something can be deemed as ‘produtive’ output. This becomes clear the moment individuals begin to harp about what kinds of products we should produce and whether they are truly beneficial to society.
Harvie, “All Labour Produces Value for Capital and We All Struggle against Value,” 133.
Harvie, 148.
Harvie, 148.
Harvie, 155.
Marx, Capital, 1981, 1044.
Fraser, “7. Behind Marx’s Hidden Abode,” 59.