Are Service Workers "Productive" Laborers?
Productive or unproductive, that is the question? Or at least it seems to be every other week when reactionaries come up on twitter crying about how one set of workers are the “real” proletariat while others aren’t.
This tweet for example has been getting a lot of traction lately.
The thread has spurred debates on who is part of the proletariat, who is a productive worker, what types of work are productive?
The thread goes on:
The points made include that the definition of the proletariat (which is not provided) makes it clear that service workers are not proletariat. Apparently, society does not need bourgeois Starbucks workers but only those who produce “material goods in real space” (whatever that means). Despite the language, the thread has no relation to a materialist analysis of class relation, let alone Marx’s.
Having established the context, this short post will focus on a couple of the issues with this tweet. The main point will be to show how we can understand terms such as proletariat, and productive labor as social relations of capitalism. What it means for something to be a social relation has everything to do with how we understand it and not just how we describe it.
By discussing both the definitions of the proletariat and productive labor, it will be shown not only why service workers can certainly be part of both groups, but why this should not be a source of pride.
Alienated Labor and the Proletariat
What makes someone part of the proletariat? This question is the source of much debate because it holds immense importance to a Marxian analysis of social relations.
Many, including the author of the tweet above, make a grave and fatal mistake in their parameters for identifying the proletariat. Mainly, they base their definition of what is the proletariat based on the material content of wage-laborers work rather than the social form under which it is undertaken.
What does this mean exactly?
It means that workers are part of the proletariat because of the social relations under which they perform their labor, not because of the type of work itself. This is stated clearly by Engels in the footnotes of the 1888 edition of the Communist Manifesto…
By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live.
…also in the Principles of Communism, he writes:
The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition. The proletariat, or the class of proletarians, is, in a word, the working class of the 19th century.
The definition is clear about what it is trying to capture and can be summarized in two key elements of the relationship of the proletariat. Together these are what make workers proletariat.
The first part is that their labor-power, i.e. their capacity to work, is itself a commodity. What makes people proletariat is that they have their labor alienated in the products of labor, commodities.
The second part is that they are forced by the relations of private property to sell their labor-power in order to survive, i.e. to access wages to purchase subsistence goods. Workers in capitalism are “free” according to Marx in a double sense. First, they are free from traditional political relations of direct domination (enslavement or serfdom) and are able to sell their labor-power to whomever. Second, they are free from any alternative source of subsistence, meaning they truly have no other way of surviving without selling their labor-power.
Ultimately, what is the crucial take away from this definition? That the material contents of the labor are irrelevant.
In other words, its the social relation under which different types of labor are performed that determine their class character, not the content of the labor itself.
Proletariat are workers who are forced to sell their labor-power as a commodity in order to live. It’s not whether you’re a doctor, uber driver, barista, professor, tattoo artist, miner and so on that determines whether you are part of the proletariat. It is the social-form in which the labor process takes place, i.e. the relations of production that organize society.
Service Work and Commodification
In understanding the proletariat as a social relation, not a thing, I can also show why service workers are just as much proletariat as any other worker employed by capital.
It is often said service workers are not ‘real’ workers because they don’t produce ‘things’ and have no material output. As the author of the tweet claimed, they don’t produce “material goods in real space”. The debate on whether services count as commodities is quite extensive.1 However, most anti-service worker arguments boil down to the statement that because they don’t produce a material good (that is a physical object) they are not proletariat.
Again, the source of confusion comes from identifying the definition of commodities with ‘things’ rather than a social relation. Commodification is not a referring the process of creating physical things, but of a social-form placed on things. That is to say, when things from goods or services are the products of peoples labor-power sold to the capitalist, they are commodities. In this formal sense, they are no different from each other. Therefore, it is the fact that the labor-power is employed by capital to generate a surplus that matters, not its material content.
Services can certainly be productive of surplus. However, its hard to see because they function in a different way. Services involve the moments of production and consumption occurring simultaneously. Marx discusses this in Volume 2 when referring to the transportation industry. It is worth quoting at length for those who are interested, and because this is such a contested debate.
But what the transport industry sells is the actual change of place itself. The useful effect produced is inseparably connected with the transport process, i.e. the production process specific to the transport industry. People and commodities travel together with the means of transport, and this journeying, the spatial movement of the means of transport, is precisely the production process accomplished by the transport industry. The useful effect can only be consumed during the production process; it does not exist as a thing of use distinct from this process, a thing which functions as an article of commerce and circulates as a commodity only after its production. However the exchange-value of this useful effect is still determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production used up in it (labor-power and means of production), plus the surplus-value created by the surplus labor of the workers occupied in the transport industry.2
Therefore, it’s clear that services can produce surplus-value, as Marx states. The issue is that most people look for a physical surplus of goods, instead of what really matters, a monetary surplus (or as Marx notes in the general formula for capital M-C-M’).
Clearly, services are not something we should ignore. Starbucks workers are just as formally exploited as Amazon workers, it just requires having a proper analysis to see this.
Having better understood the proletariat and service workers, I’ll close this discussion with an analysis of productive and unproductive labor.
Productive and Unproductive Labor
The quotes come from the appendix of the Penguin edition of Capital Volume 1 called ‘Productive Unproductive Labor’. For context, these notes were not published by Marx in Capital but added by editors for this English version.
Immediately Marx presents a clear definition of productive labor:
Since the immediate purpose and the authentic product of capitalist production is surplus-value, labor is only productive, and an exponent of labour-power is only a productive worker, if it or he 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.3
There is an important point to note here. The central determinant of productivity lies in the valorization process and not the labor process. In other words, it lies in the quantitative social relation of surplus-value production and not in the qualities of the specific commodity being produced.4
Marx himself is quite explicitly about this, stating:
From the foregoing it is evident that for labor to be designated productive, qualities are required which are utterly unconnected with the specific content of the labor, with its particular utility or the use-value in which it is objectified. Hence labor with the same content can be either productive or unproductive. (1044)
Labor with the same content (that is the same type of labor) can either be productive or unproductive based on the social relation in which it is employed. Let’s look at an example to make this clearer.
If you go and get your hair cut at a salon/barbershop where the stylists is a worker hired by a capitalist to cut hair, they are a productive laborer. Why? Because their labor is employed by the capitalist. It’s labor used to turn one sum of money (M) into more money (M’) through a production process.5
Now imagine the same worker actually gives haircuts on the side for cash. The same labor here is being performed, their is no difference in the material content of the labor. However, the social form under which it is being employed is different. Here, the labor employed is not being used as the variable part of capital, as labor-power employed by the capitalist to valorize capital. It is rather a service being performed in which the income is coming directly as revenue rather than profit. In both examples the stylists are a proletariat and wage-worker. Only in one however are they a productive worker in the capitalist sense. Marx gives a similar example using a tailor in the appendix section.
This brings us back to the argument that was made by the tweet that Amazon workers are “necessary” while Starbucks workers aren’t. This misidentification is the result of what Marx refers to as “bourgeois obtuseness”, which believes capitalist production is “production in its absolute form”.6 This confuses what is productive in general versus what is productive labor from the standpoint of capital. We are concerned with an analysis of the logical functioning of capitalism in order to critic it and overcome it.
What I want to highlight here is that no capitalist is concerned first and foremost with what we need to produce socially. It is not about general productivity, which entails moral, ethical, political, and social judgments of what must be produced. Capital does not care about these things. Now of course things that we need to subsist have to be produced, but its complicated defining exactly what this is, unless one wants to use a somewhat arbitrary measure of biological necessity.7
Instead, when a capitalist decides whether to invest in the production of a good or service, the main concern is can it make them money? Or we could say, can it produce surplus-value? Whatever is being actually produced is irrelevant to the question of productivity.
If a capitalist hired a bunch of actors to perform an experimental art piece, in which each drop their pants and defecate, vomit and spit all over the stage, and enough people come to produce a profit, this is productive labor. If an off duty doctor performs services off the books and takes the income as revenue, or volunteers their services to charity, it is unproductive. Capital is absurd, but it has a logic of operation.
The notion of productive labor being only that which produces a product becomes more absurd when given the example of fidget spinners and doctors. Sure, many would say miners are more productive than Starbucks workers, but would you say the workers at a fidget spinner factory are more productive than a service worker in the form of a doctor? A doctor doesn’t produce products but provides/produces a service. Very few would say doctors do not have the capacity to be productive laborers, otherwise healthcare would not be a trillion dollar industry!
Reactionaries and liberals like the person who tweeted, often take this immense contradiction and actually naturalize it rather than source it in the relations of valorization.
Conclusions: Don’t be proud of being productive
Being proud of being a productive worker is not a good thing. It’s no different than when libertarians, liberals or conservatives are proud of being screwed by capitalism.
Both Amazon and Starbucks workers are productive workers, but this should not be a source of pride but of anger. Their unpaid labor is the life of capital. They are the source of capital’s power. However, socialist should not only organize based on who is productive or unproductive.
All laborers who are forced to sell their labor to someone in order to live are proletariat. Socialists are fighting not against the content of work, but the social form it takes under capitalism. The abolition of money, class and the state are the basis of how we must organize and fight against capital. Liberal idealism such as a notion of “real” workers being only those who produce goods does nothing but work against these goals.
Reactionaries after reading this post:
Tregenna, Fiona. 2009. “Services’ in Marxian Economic Thought.” Working Paper. Faculty of Economics. https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.5641
Capital Volume 2, p.135
Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, p. 1042
The distinction between the labor process and valorization process refers to the simultaneous process in capitalist production of the creationg of material goods and services versus social value. See Chapter 7 of Capital Volume 1 for a full dicussion
This is represented by the general formula for capital M-C-M’ or Money-Commodities-More + More Money.
Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, p. 1039
Capital Volume 1: A Critique of Political Economy, p. 1039. The question of what humans exactly need to survive is more complex than it appears. Often there is reference to bare biological necessity, however this often falls into arguments that are abstractly material and do not take into account social forces that really decide what is deemed socially necessary in a certain period of history. This is something I may discusse further in a later date.
Tag if you’re here because of CCK Philosophy.
Great post. This has been a contentious debate in my Capital reading group. I have a question for you about some of the terms you used:
You say "The issue is that most people look for a physical surplus of goods, instead of what really matters, a monetary surplus (or as Marx notes in the general formula for capital M-C-M’)." But then later on you refer refer to the production of value. The latter to me is more consistent + how I would understand things. Wouldn't it be a *value* surplus rather than a monetary one? Maybe I'm confused here but it seems to me that there are unproductive industries that create a monetary surplus without creating a value surplus (e.g. finance, insurance, or to Marx, storage)