The Proletariat and the Problem of Unproductive Labor

Thank you to the following proletarians for their work footage:

Marx texts cited:

[leninscat]

this is why i left twitter. the absolute contempt these isolated armchair weirdos hold you in is utterly insane. "if you don't understand this, you never will". like imagine saying this at a picket line? or in an organising event. they are so far up their own ass about how correct and amazing they are they've forgotten to talk like real people in the real world.

[chompythebeast]

_"If you don't understand this, you never will."_

Ah yes, the scientific method and dialectical materialism at their finest: If you don't understand it before even starting, give up

[ilhamrahim]

What many people miss is that for Marx productive and unproductive labour are completely amoral terms

[evilrobert]

society does not need professional twitter philosophers

[fablecouvrette]

Anyone who says "reactionary union of bourgeois service work" can be dismissed out of hand, they're just playing word jumble.

[achmeineye]

Anyone who does not have capital and must sell their labor-power to survive is the proletariat...it's not difficult

[mlzplayer]

To qualify a proletarian by their concrete labor is simply not Marxist. Instead of seeing a social class or a wage relationships, these folks are under the mirage that proletarians are a community of artisans. I had a friend who worked as a stripper but moved into being a construction worker. If their concrete labor has changed, but in both jobs their abstract labor is sold for profit, they are still fundamentally within the wage relationship and thus proletarian. As in the time of Marx, a worker can work at any job yet they are still a worker, and that is what matters in the science of class.

[LimeyLassen]

There's something very funny to me about someone accusing service workers of being "reactionary", for largely aesthetic/cultural reasons. Like, on a surface level, barista is a rather effete and fashionable job to have. He immediately went to the urban liberal steretype rather than say, cave guide or karate instructor.

[JustMe-yrlw]

"Does an Amazon worker suddenly become unproductive when they ship Marvel merchandise?" is such a banger 1 line retort to this idea

[francegamer]

I think the idea is that in a communist society certain unneeded jobs would disappear, servants of the lord and the like. The issue is that 1: those workers are still yet workers and absolutely cannot be excluded from any wider movement and
2: when you take it to the extreme you start to consider any luxury, any labor not needed for basic human subsistence as frivolous bourgeois labor, and endorsing a world without even a nice hot drink in the morning feels like you're very much playing into the ascetic communist stereotype.

[DEGriffSoc]

I think a good reason to combat this idea of 'starbucks workers aren't workers', even if it is being forwarded in a clearly rubbish manner, is that it is a really old idea that has proven very resilient. The very earliest moments of the union movement sought to exclude waiters (which is basically what Starbucks workers are), hotel porters, domestic servants and so on. Anybody who had to do emotional labour was often considered outside the movement, to significant damage.

Now, of course, most workers have to do some emotional labour so the prejudice is unmoored from its origin.

[Durandurandal]

Something tells me that original poster just wants to justify how rude and disrespectful they have been and intend to continue being toward workers they actually have to interact with from time to time in the capacity of a customer, unlike the glorious amazon fulfillment center proletariat whom they only engage with abstractly (as a customer) lol

[granola-approach]

actually starbucks workers are mostly women and being a woman is bourgeousie. hope this helps

Im kidding, this is a good video. I don't know where you're from and maybe it's like this a lot of places but I think it's interesting that in the USA 'working class' is a cultural identity; some dude who owns a quarter million dollar truck, owns an hvac company, etc is working class cuz he's a republican, but a starbucks worker who lives on minimum wage isnt because they're supposedly part of some liberal elite or whatever.

[amanofnoreputation]

Even the idea that society doesn't need Starbucks falls apart because though there's no strictly utilitarian purpose a cafe can serve that a cafeteria cannot, society still needs recreational and social facilities. "What society needs" cannot be described exhaustivly, but this need in particular is something which is not liable to change with circumstances.
While there is perhaps something bourgeois about the kind of lifestyle associated with these facilities as opposed to the rugged and pragmatic worker in manual labor, this has no bearing on private property, which is the real core of what socialism is about.

[peach_total]

also the idea that starbucks baristas specifically are just “service workers” is wrong. on a base level, someone taking pieces of wood and refining them into a table for a customer in a factory is the same as someone taking coffee beans and milk etc and refining them into drinks for a customer in a starbucks

[placeholder]

Bourgeois service work? Is that supposed to be a funny oxymoron?

[nkozi]

I remember this thread and how hilarious I found it because when it was posted I was literally in the underground agitation phase of unionizing a coffee chain. We won, btw. Contract will be ratified soon.

[mattjk]

I just think a lot of this is driven by people personally disliking service workers, which is pretty amusing honestly. As if said "unproductive occupations" are created and sculpted explicitly by the people employed by a coercive economic system rather than the other way around.

[laddb]

Something worth considering is the gendered undertones present when discussing what constitutes "real" labor. The types of labor deemed "productive, " as described by Logo Daedalus, all involve supplying raw materials, presumably applying heavy physical work typically associated with strong, muscular men. On the other hand, when you think of a writer, a barista, or a librarian, the first image that likely comes to mind is not of someone who is not exceedingly masculine. It appears that the invented distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" labor is essentially a division between "hard" masculine labor and "soft, " effeminate labor where only the former deserves sympathy.

[SuperPukebucket]

Society is when no one enjoys anything.

Edit: Source: I am a femboy who just picks up old people and takes them to the hospital(paramedic), therefore not a worker, thats why I cant have a union.