#productive labor

Religion is dead as a mainstream cultural force, radical ideology suppressed and philosophy commercialized, leaving people with little identity outside of the standard prefabricated consumer identities. In the 21st century, you can't just flip burgers for the purpose of earning money to survive. Work is an end onto itself. You have to flip those burgers, and to get the job flipping burgers, you have to write a cover letter explaining why it has always been your passion to flip your burgers.

In the struggle of the heart and emotions, the individual consciousness is only a musical abstract moment. In work and enjoyment which make this unsubstantial existence a reality, it can directly forget itself, and the consciousness of its own particular role in this realization is cancelled out by the act of thankful acknowledgement. But this cancelling-out is in truth a return of consciousness into itself, and, moreover, into itself as the actuality which it knows to be true.

The globalization and deregulation processes initiated in the 1980's which reached it's height in the middle of the 1990's has not only dug an ever-deeper ditch between the financial system and the real economy. It has caused the surplus value of production to be increasingly allotted to shareholders and holders of capital while wage-earners receive less. By exposing the workforces of developed countries to competition from the underpaid laborers of emerging economies, capital owners have managed to depress salaries, forgetting that workers are also consumers.

Quite different is the situation created by Work. Man who transforms given Nature. Hence, if he repeat his act, he repeats it in different conditions, and thus his act itself wil be different. After making the first ax, man can use it to make a second one, which, by that very fact, will be another, better ax. Production transforms the means of production; the modification of means simplifies production; and so on. Where there is Work, then, there is necessarily change progress, historical evolution.

Secondly. Capital is by definition money, but not merely money in the simple form of gold and silver, nor merely as money in opposition to circulation, but in the form of all substances – commodities. To that degree, therefore, it does not, as capital, stand in opposition to use value, but exists apart from money precisely only in use values. These, its substances themselves, are thus now transitory ones, which would have no exchange value if they had no use value; but which lose their value as use values and are dissolved by the simple metabolism of nature if they are not actually used, and which disappear even more certainly if they are actually used. In this regard, the opposite of capital cannot itself be a particular commodity, for as such it would form no opposition to capital, since the substance of capital is itself use value; it is not this commodity or that commodity, but all commodities. The communal substance of all commodities, i.e. their substance not as material stuff, as physical character, but their communal substance as commodities and hence exchange values, is this, that they are objectified labour. * The only thing distinct from objectified labour is non-objectified labour, labour which is still objectifying itself, labour as subjectivity. Or, objectified labour, i.e. labour which is present in space, can also be opposed, as past labour, to labour which is present in time. If it is to be present in time, alive, then it can be present only as the living subject, in which it exists as capacity, as possibility; hence as worker. The only use value, therefore, which can form the opposite pole to capital is labour (to be exact, value-creating, productive labour. This marginal remark is an anticipation; must first be developed, by and by. Labour as mere performance of services for the satisfaction of immediate needs has nothing whatever to do with capital, since that is not capital’s concern. If a capitalist hires a woodcutter to chop wood to roast his mutton over, then not only does the wood-cutter relate to the capitalist, but also the capitalist to the wood-cutter, in the relation of simple exchange. The woodcutter gives him his service, a use value, which does not increase capital; rather, capital consumes itself in it; and the capitalist gives him another commodity for it in the form of money. The same relation holds for all services which workers exchange directly for the money of other persons, and which are consumed by these persons. This is consumption of revenue, which, as such, always falls within simple circulation; it is not consumption of capital. Since one of the contracting parties does not confront the other as a capitalist, this performance of a service cannot fall under the category of productive labour. From prostitute to pope, there is a mass of such rabble. But the honest and ‘working’ lumpenproletariat belongs here as well; e.g. the great mob of porters etc. who render service in seaport cities etc. He who represents money in this relation demands the service only for its use value, which immediately vanishes for him; but the porter demands money, and since the party with money is concerned with the commodity and the party with the commodity, with money, it follows that they represent to one another no more than the two sides of simple circulation; goes without saying that the porter, as the party concerned with money, hence directly with the general form of wealth, tries to enrich himself at the expense of his improvised friend, thus injuring the latter’s self-esteem, all the more so because he, a hard calculator, has need of the service not qua capitalist but as a result of his ordinary human frailty. A. Smith was essentially correct with his productive and unproductive labour, correct from the standpoint of bourgeois economy. [45] What the other economists advance against it is either horse-piss (for instance Storch, Senior even lousier etc.), [46] namely that every action after all acts upon something, thus confusion of the product in its natural and in its economic sense; so that the pickpocket becomes a productive worker too, since he indirectly produces books on criminal law (this reasoning at least as correct as calling a judge a productive worker because he protects from theft). Or the modern economists have turned themselves into such sycophants of the bourgeois that they want to demonstrate to the latter that it is productive labour when somebody picks the lice out of his hair, or strokes his tail, because for example the latter activity will make his fat head – blockhead – clearer the next day in the office. It is therefore quite correct – but also characteristic – that for the consistent economists the workers in e.g. luxury shops are productive, although the characters who consume such objects are expressly castigated as unproductive wastrels. The fact is that these workers, indeed, are productive, as far as they increase the capital of their master; unproductive as to the material result of their labour. In fact, of course, this ‘productive’ worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk. But, looked at more precisely, it turns out in fact that the true definition of a productive worker consists in this: A person who needs and demands exactly as much as, and no more than, is required to enable him to gain the greatest possible benefit for his capitalist. All this nonsense. Digression. But return in more detail to the productive and unproductive). * But only this economic (social) substance of use values, i.e. of their economic character as content as distinct from their form (but this form value, because specific amount of this labour), comes into question when searching for an antithesis to capital. As far as their natural differences are concerned, none of them excludes capital from entering into them and making their bodies its own, so long as none excludes the character of exchange value and of the commodity.

But by focusing only on this capitalist concept of productive labour and by universalizing it to the virtual eclipse of the more general and fundamental concept of productive labour - which could include women’s production of life - Marx himself has theoretically contributed to the removal of all ‘non-productive’ labour (that is, non-wage labour, including most of women’s labour) from public visibility. The concept of ‘productive labour’, used henceforth both by bourgeois as well as by Marxist theoreticians, has maintained this capitalist connotation, and the critique which Marx had still attached to it is long forgotten. I consider this narrow, capitalist concept of ‘productive labour’ the most formidable hurdle in our struggle to come to an understanding of women’s labour both under capitalism and actually existing socialism.

It is thus necessary, regarding the concept of the productivity of labour, to reject its narrow definition and to show that labour can only be productive in the sense of producing surplus value as long as it can tap, extract, exploit, and appropriate labour which is spent in the production of life, or subsistence production (Mies, 1980(b)) which is largely non-wage labour mainly done by women. As this production of life is the perennial precondition of all other historical forms of productive labour, including that under conditions of capitalist accumulation, it has to be defined as work and not as unconscious ‘natural’ activity. In what follows, I will call the labour that goes into the production of life productive labour in the broad sense of producing use values for the satisfaction of human needs. The separation from and the superimposition of surplus-producing labour over life-producing labour is an abstraction which leads to the fact that women and their work are being ‘defined into nature'.

Cooking food produces a material commodity. You could just as well say a service is transformed into steel ingots—another material commodity. Though the fast-food industry is certainly not “heavy industry,” this has nothing to do with whether or not the workers are productive. Indeed, just as is the case within the steel industry itself, the workers produce a very tangible commodity—a Big Mac. In reality, the workers in restaurants are very much industrial workers working for industrial capitalists, the owners of the fast-food industry. In addition—though, as we saw above, this makes no difference as to whether or not their labor is productive labor—the fast-food workers produce a material commodity—a cooked meal such as a Big Mac—even if the use value might be rather dubious in this case! Even if we use Adam Smith’s definition of productive labor, as opposed to that of Marx, workers that produce Big Macs are productive workers. Capitalist statisticians like to classify fast-food workers as service workers. They do this to make it appear that the industrial working class—the workers who produce surplus value—is rapidly shrinking in size if it is not disappearing altogether. This is an example of why we have to approach the official economic statistics issued by capitalist governments with the greatest caution—whether this involves the definition of a “recession” or the number of industrial workers in a given country at a given time. Recently, if I remember correctly, it was proposed in the United States that the fast-food workers be re-classified from service workers to manufacturing workers. The reason for this proposal? The decline in “manufacturing workers”—as defined by the U.S. government—is reaching such alarming proportions that it might make the U.S. economy seem healthier if the number of such workers could be given a boost—by redefining some workers, such as fast-food workers, now classified as service workers, as manufacturing workers!