AskProfWolff: Why Marx Differentiates 'Productive' from 'Unproductive Labor'

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A Patron of Economic Update asks: "You mention three types of "actors" within the modern U.S. economy: productive, unproductive, and capitalist. Are unproductive workers those in fields such as information technology, business analysis, the law, doctors and other "white collar" or "grey collar", non-service fields? I assume productive workers are defined as those who engage in manual, or service, labor or work in manufacturing."

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[dinnerwithfranklin]

Excellent explanation as always Professor, thanks

[maxstormhamburger]

Been following you since the beginning of the pandemic. I am taking economics and finance classes atm and it is so refreshing to hear an EXPLAINATION which makes sense. Thank you, sincerely, thank you.

[kamalpreetsingh]

Thanks for sharing your knowledge professor

[maxstormhamburger]

The more I study "Marxism" (a bad word where I live and to every person I know) the more it seems that he has ADDED to our economic understanding rather than challenging known principles. He critiques capitalism, it is fascinating and should not be viewed as a boogieman/threat as some economists and politicians pretend or imagine.

[kitscheugy]

Thanks Wolff... You make me less stupid.

[Joaquimasn]

Dear Mr Richard Wolf you are completely right about this explanation.

[joevignoloru]

There is another type of worker - the counterproductive worker. This type of worker, through his or her actions, has a regressive and adverse effect on an organization. Counterproductive workers, especially in management positions, cause productive workers to have to work harder and struggle more to counteract and balance out the damage being done by the counterproductive worker. Its like having to carry deadweight around on your back.

[tantzer]

Prof. Wollf: you answered the how question, not the why question — explained how the two terms are defined, but not what role this distinction plays in analysis, and what different things are said about these two different kinds of labor. Perhaps you think it’s better to avoid technical discussions on this platform.

[johnchristopherdelegero]

“It is well enough that people of the nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning.” ~henry ford

Thats why managers, guards and police gets big wages, without them revolution of workers happens before tomorrow!

[justgivemethetruth]

As usual these are great videos that I always learn something from. Thanks for making them, Something occurred to me after the "the same is true of capitalism" statement at around 3:07 .

I recently read the book "The End Of The Megamachine" by Fabian Scheidler. This book is brilliant and has me thinking about and considering ideas that had never occurred to me before.

We use these terms Capitalism and Socialism and even Communism ( mostly used to insult or dismiss by Republicans ) but the term Capitalism used by both sides of the political spectrum has always seemed confusing to me. I am 100% there with Marx's critiques of Capitalism, but what else would we use to sustain day to day working and bartering and buying and consuming? There is not another word that depicts small scale or benevolent capitalism, or fair trade that I know of, contrasted to the high level Capitalism that exploits people and drives wars, famines, human and environmental exploitation, and cheating in business and inevitably takes over government.

I believe that Capitalism, what we call Capitalism, is the base, the substrate of all economic activity. What Scheidler's book made me consider is that what we call Socialism ( and democracy ) is really the push back of the people against the abuses and failures of the corrupt and inhuman way that capitalism evolves under evil and influences the elites and takes over whatever form of government exists for "the people" whenever and wherever a high level of economic activity, AND DEPENDENCY exists.

Scheidler says in his book that we have a twisted sense of what democracy is because we associate it with Capitalism, or rather we are told that democracy comes from or is byproduct of capitalism. What Scheidler says it that as Capitalism expands and evolves it creates injustices and hurts people, and that democracy comes out of the people pushing back against the capitalists and the government they influence or create. People pushing back against injustice is democracy, and the acknowledgement of this codified in the government, the rights, the regulations, and the protections that come out of that matches what I think of as the basic idea of socialism.

This idea has been percolating in inchoate form in my brain since I saw the "Capitalism: A Love Story" movie by Michael Moore where the late Tony Benn said that Capitalism is Democracy, which I think were his exact words in the movie. This framing of Capitalism, Democracy and Socialism has the added benefit in that it explains why American Republicans and a lot of Democrats resist democracy so hard, and in fact it is their main raison d'être. The power structure that we need for stability is also a system that does treat human beings like slaves, and if they are not slaves to begin with they put societal mechanisms in place to make them think and feel like slaves, and like this system is inevitable and righteous.

[danieljones]

Ahhh. Now I understand the term "Unproductive Labor". It's the Third Element of Capitalism...fulfilling the "Law Of Three". Thank you Professor Wolff.

[TheRantingRooster]

I've always been a fan of the idea, everyone in the workplace spends a day as the company janitor.

[mrzack]

something tells me Prof. Wolff has mucho knowledge that he's been holding back due to the simple low sophistication of the average American public.

[russingram]

Wolff is holding a great deal back here.

Marx was primarily concerned with what he called the value form - how value was "crystallized" socially through specific actions (labor). Marx supported the abolition of exchange value-form.

Realizing this, you realize that Wolff's prescriptions actually retain and reinforce this value-form- worker's co-ops are still capitalist, insofar as they retain production for exchange. And welfare programmes function as an example of what Marx identifies as "primary (primitive) accumulation" - their function is to hook the individual back into production for exchange as a consumer.

Marx doesn't want a redistribution of wealth or a mere abolition of a certain social class. He wants the abolition of the value form.

[hamnchee]

Secretaries and security guards are only "unproductive" if you say security and organization are not products that are sold. They are. You might as well say ladders aren't a product either, as they only provide the conditions for climbing.

[gripken]

After another session of Prof Wolf; Economics Knowledge +3

[emcity]

Would managerial/ supervisory positions that subjugate the labor environment be complicit in lacking contribution to the bottom-line production by safely securing credit for productive labor, while still being able to hold individual labor accountable if production falls short?

[Genedide]

I think there needs to be A distinction called counterproductive laborers. Cockshott talk about people like finance, sex work, arms production, and gambling, all having in common that they are destructive to wealth. Unproductive labor on the other hand is necessary wealth such as pilots and firefighters. In fact the growing porn industry is a disturbing example of accumulation by displacement. Because the productive industry has been exported to semi-peripheries, the U.S. labor force had choices: beg for an insurance/teller position, or create an OnlyFans.

[correspondencecommittee]

I doubt anyone would be very successful relating to and organizing working class people around the distinction between productive and unproductive labor Wolff Draws here. I can't imagine, for instance, gaining much ground with the many secretaries, security guards, and others assigned to the conditions of labor, as he puts it, by insisting upon such "precise sense" of academic analysis as to call their own blood, sweat, and tears of wage slavery 'unproductive'.

Of course, I'm sure this is not what the good professor had in mind when he composed this textbook lecture on Marxism 101 dealing with surplus labor, and blah, blah, blah. But it does recall that what takes place in college classrooms, for example, in which professors seem to thrive at the expense of the exploited students therein, may pose their own problems for the lived material conditions of working class people, like setting those conditions within frameworks which may misrepresent them with another kind of false consciousness born of idle theory that fails to address changing the world beyond merely (mis)interpreting it, as Marx stressed in his thesis on Feuerbach. And it does bring to mind how there are professional class intellectuals who themselves serve as ideological managers over us in counterproductive ways, so much so that we would do better without their labor.

[kitscheugy]

I like that you lay it out in an understandable manner. My conclusion is that it's very easy to see that productive and unproductive workers alike have been secrewed out of the wealth that has been produced by them and that relationship has set up a bad dynamic in society world wide wherever capitalism is. Not only does it create social injustices, but it is also fueling the anthropocene epoch and its exesitinial threat via human driven climate change. Like noam Chomsky says, we are threatening our ability to conduct organized civilized human life and only through that arrangement will we save our habitable environment on earth. Like dave mustane said in coundown to extinction, one hour from now another species of life-form will go extinct from the face of the planet forever, and the rate is accelerating. That was the early 90s. I wonder if and when we will ever get our act together. Ive gotta go to work to barely make the rent, what are you doing. This is depressing.