Unproductive labour and exploitation
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As an aside, terminology often confuses me.
At one time it was First World, Third Word, then it became developed, developing and undeveloped countries and now its Global North and Global South.
Which should i use and how are they defined?
Thanks for your considered reply, robbo. I’m not ignoring the rest of your post, about the socio-historical specifics of the different ‘surpluses’ produced in different modes of production, but I don’t think that you’ve got to the core of the problem (which, to me, is the failure to question the ‘concepts’ being used by Cope and you).
robbo203 wrote: “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 .”
If there are two ‘senses’ in which ‘productive’ is being used, why not give them different names? Worse, why give one of these ‘senses’ the apparently opposite meaning of ‘unproductive’? Why not call them ‘non-surplus-value-productive’ and ‘surplus-value-productive’, for example?
At least this mouthful would make it clear to any worker reading, who does this former type of work, that they are not ‘unproductive’, which carries moral overtones, and seems to suggest that these supposedly ‘unproductive’ workers are ‘wasters’ of some sort. It would be clearer to them that they are just as productive as any other worker who works hard, and the real issue is of ‘academics’ arguing over foggy terms, like ‘surplus value’, which they like to pretend are ‘objective’ concepts, which workers should have no place in determining, and so the academics can talk over the heads of those workers, as the academics are doing ‘objective science’, which doesn’t require the participation of workers themselves.
The reason that I think you should critically examine Cope’s concepts, is to compare them with your own, see if they are actually different, and if they are, to realise that any critique that you make without this examination would be pointless, because you’d be arguing at cross-purposes.
Further, it would make it obvious to any workers reading, that there are not actually any ‘objective’ terms, which everyone agrees upon (like ‘unproductive’ or ‘productive’), but that their own active, critical participation in any political debate about ‘production’ in their own society, is indispensable to that debate.
It’s my political opinion that whilst ‘academics’ think that they have access to a set of ‘objective’ concepts, and so they don’t need to consult workers about concepts, those academics will continue to discuss ‘capitalism’ without the active participation of workers. To put it bluntly, bourgeois academics will continue to talk out of their arses about something which they don’t understand – and so, not surprisingly, workers will continue to ignore those academics, who aren’t half as bright as they think that they are.
Let’s face it, as long as supposed ‘socialists’ are telling most poor, hard-working, struggling workers in ‘the West’ that they are ‘unproductive’, we shouldn’t be surprised when many of those workers prefer Trump and Johnson, to those ‘socialists’.
I should finish on a positive note, that I’m sympathetic to your criticism of Cope’s elitist ‘Global North Labour Aristocracy’ assumptions; it’s just that I’d widen your criticism to other similar targets (like ‘Scientific Socialism’, for example, which has similar elitist contempt for democratic controls on its activities, as do the likewise Leninist-inspired ‘labour aristocrat’ theorists). Lenin’s ‘theories’ were patronising bullshit then, and still are now.
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”
I think you are right, Robbo, to point out that the concept of exploitation can be separated from that of producing surplus value. As you say, all previous class societies have been based on exploitation but without producing surplus “value”, only a surplus product directly appropriated by their exploiters.
This recalls the trick question in our Speaker’s Test: Do peasants produce surplus value? (not that you failed if you got the answer wrong ). The answer, if I remember, is that under feudalism as serfs they don’t and under capitalism, as peasant proprietors whose products are sold as commodities, they produce value but not surplus value. On the other hand, the slaves in the plantations of the southern USA produced surplus value because what they produced was sold on a market with a view to profit.
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
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
He must be in bed with those environment pessimists who advocate degrowth but don’t expect a drop in the consumption patterns of consumers in the West and deny any increase in standards of living for the poorer countries to compensate.
He is doing a ‘Left’ version of Libertarian nonsense that workers are wealthier now and therefore not exploited, which ignores the increased rate of exploitation at the points of production (wherever they occur) and the precariousness of the service sectors.
In any case capitalism is global and apart from workers in high volume low earning service sectors being acutely impoverished, the rest are using devices being manufactured in conditions resembling earlier capitalist development, child labour etc.
This type of splitist focus takes us away from advocating the global common class interests of the immense majority, even those who think they are not working class any more, to relieve the superfluous economic parasite class of their ‘burden’ of ownership.
Third world has been used incorrectly by the leftists and right wingers Third world countries were those countries that were not aligned with any block of the Cold War but Cuba was aligned with the Soviet Union and they were part of the non aligned countries
Mao created the three world theory, the first world was composed by the USA and the Soviet Union, the second war was composed by England France and Germany and the third world was Latin America Asia and Africa
This article from 1998, by a member of the World Socialist Party (India), deals with the question of whether the workers of one country exploit the workers of another and why wages are different in different countries:
Enver Hoxha rejected both concept of the Third World and the Mao Theory of the Three world and included China as part of the imperialist block, but he continued using Lenin concept of anti-imperialism, and he said that Albania was the only socialist country. All those theory are wrong including the so called underdeveloped, developed, north and south, this is a society divided between workers and capitalists, and does not many any difference about their geographic locations
Despite that Marx took the definition from Adam Smith and Classical Economy, it is too rigid for our time, all workers around the world are exploited, and I second Mattew Colbert point of view, our message is for all workers despite belonging to the productive or unproductive sectors, rural or urban workers, we can not pay too much attention to those so called innovators, for me Karl Marx was more than enough, and we are still digging into Marx’a works. Engels himself when Marx died, he was surprised to see that Marx was working in so many different aspect of the capitalist society , and he was not aware of that, and he was his closest collaborator. Like Peter Huis wrote in one of his book: “It was too much work for one man”
Lenin theory of imperialism and anti-imperialism is totally wrong and it was only a way to cover up the bourgeoisie nationalism of the Bolsheviks. I have always said that the so called Marxist-Leninist Parties are just communist/nationalist parties of the countries where they have been created. I was able to see Communist Parties that were formed in a living room by two or five individuals and they called it the party of the working class, and in another town they were building two more workers parties using the members from another party, at the present they have vanished from the face to the earth. The worst conception of Marxism-Leninism Mao Tse Tung thought, and all oppressed nations to fight against oppressors nations, that is reason why many leftist said that the American workers are oppressors. Marx and socialist theory has been totally distorted, and it is just pure bourgeois nationalism
Global North and Global South it is just a terminally created by IMF, but it is similar to the old definition of Mao Tse Tung, and as always the leftist like to adopt the definition of the capitalist class and turn ir or adopt into their own definition. At the present time for them the problem of the world is the banking system and the USA Federal Reserve Bank, the Sionists and the Rothschild family . The problem of capitalism is the whole system, it is not one aspect of capitalism, the German capitalist said that the problem is the jewish bankers, and the Japanese capitalists were anti-imperialists. The term economical expansion is not longer valid, now the new term is Globalization which is also capitalist expansion, so leftists are saying that Donald Trump is an anti-globalists. The blind continue guiding the blinds, and peoples are not reading books any more, libraries are empty, they just go to you Tube which is propagating all those false theories. This is a world divided between workers and capitalists and Marx definition of class and capitalism is still valid, and our main problem is not Donald Trump, Neo-liberalism, or the Banking system, it is capitalism
The A to Z of Marxism (an updated version of which was put up on this site last week) has this to say under “Productive and unproductive labour”
Productive and in productive labour. Productive labour is that employment which creates surplus value for the capitalist, whereas unproductive labour does not. For example, a chef employed by a capitalist to work in his hotel is productive, whereas if that same chef were employed to work in the capitalist’s home they would be unproductive. Nowadays, though, most unproductive labour is carried out in the state sector of the economy.
The distinction is useful for analysing the structure of capitalism. For instance, it sets theoretical limits for the size of the state sector of the economy, since this must be paid out of the surplus value arising from productive labour. No judgement is implied on the importance or worth of either type of work and the working class carries out both productive and unproductive labour.
Reading S. Savran & E. Tonak, ‘Productive and Unproductive Labour: An Attempt at Clarification and Classification’, Capital & Class, 1999
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