Non-productive labor and defining value

[Hammilton]

I started re-reading parts of Das Kapital tonight since I was ill, and when I did, I was wondering, how is the value of non-productive labor defined? By non-productive labor I mean labor which doesn't directly produce anything.

I'm going to use someone who works at one of these so-called 'working warehouses' like Home Depot, Fleet Farm and (IIRC) Sam's Club, where there are basically three different categories of employees- the ones who get new products on the shelves and put away (freight), the ones who help you decide what to buy, and talk you into spending more (sales associates) and the ones who actually take your money (cashiers). None of these people produce anything directly, but their labor definitely produces value for the company. It seems like the sales associates are probably the easiest to define. Their labor can be defined by how much product is sold in their department during the time they were working. That seems fairly simple, but extremely variable, and capricious.

How do you measure the value of putting a pallet in the overhead or taking money at the register?

Must some complicated method of subtracting their contribution to the sales associates value be used?

[S.Artesian]

I'm not sure I would call all of that "unproductive labor." Sales associates and clerks definitely, but the warehousing,storage, and movement of the goods themselves falls into the means of circulation, not unlike railroads, shipping, longshore workers, etc.

As for measuring the value of putting a pallet in the overhead.... same way as everything else.. by the necessary time of reproducing putting a pallet in the overhead.

[Maximum Marxist]

How does winning a lottery ticket or striking gold relate to this? Clearly no labor is involved but alot of money is gained? :confused:

[Hammilton]

As for measuring the value of putting a pallet in the overhead.... same way as everything else.. by the necessary time of reproducing putting a pallet in the overhead.

That's not my understanding of marx?

[Primavera]

These are all examples of unproductive labor in the realm of exchange. To Marx, these are simply transaction costs and barriers to accumulation. That is, because the capitalist has to take the commodity to the market for its value to be realized, he must incur some cost for this to happen. That does not mean that these workers in any way add value to the product. The product has already been 'valorized' in the production process, it just hasn't been realized in the exchange process. Whether or not you need 1 or 100 people to handle the actual process of selling the product it has no effect on the product's value. The price might need to be adjusted to absorb these transaction costs, but the value does not change. Remember that socially necessary labor time is not a measure of prices, it is a measure of value and these two things can depart from each other (due to supply and demand, transaction costs, taxation, etc.).

[Luís Henrique]

I was wondering, how is the value of non-productive labor defined? By non-productive labor I mean labor which doesn't directly produce anything.

First, what are you exactly talking about? The value of "labour", or the value of the labour power?

If you are talking about the labour power, it is defined in the same way as any labour power: it is given by the cost of reproduction of labour power. Ie, the value of the labour power of, say, cashiers, is defined by the amount of food, shelter, schooling, etc. needed to ensure that those cashiers will be back to work each morning, plus allowing them to breed other workers of similar social prestige.

If you are talking about "labour", as in the result of labour, then the answer is zero. Unproductive work, by definition, produces no value (which doesn't mean it doesn't produce things - teachers in a public school, for instance, produce no value, but they sure produce some "thing").

Being "unproductive" doesn't mean it is "unnecessary".

In your example, cashiers and sales associates produce no value; their work however is socially necessary (under a capitalist society, anyway) to realize and distribute value. So the earnings of the commercial capitalist are actually a deduction of the global surplus value. Their ventures produce no value, but are necessary to turn value embodied into commodities into value embodied into money, and vice-versa. And so their profits are defined by the average profit rate: if commercial businesses makes more profits than productive businesses, capital will flow from production to commerce - and conversely -, until competition levels profits into the average.

Luís Henrique

[S.Artesian]

Productive labor is defined as labor that produces a surplus value. Marx considered transportation and storage, warehousing labor to be productive labor. Look at the movement of commodities in production:

When a finished commodity is moved into inventory of a capitalist's own enterprise, and into a warehouse, isn't that part of the labor of producing the commodity, part of the V that is broken down in to a necessary labor time of its own reproduction, and a surplus labor time yielding surplus value to the capitalist?

If that is the case, then why is the same labor now performed during the circulation of the commodity, between its commodity form and its money form, no longer productive?

[heftieleftie]

How does winning a lottery ticket or striking gold relate to this? Clearly no labor is involved but alot of money is gained? :confused:

Value is not created in those situations. Money is not value, it is a means of allocating and redistributing purchasing power, which in a capitalist society is not even mildly correlated with the amount of value a person has participated in creating through work.

[Primavera]

Productive labor is defined as labor that produces a surplus value. Marx considered transportation and storage, warehousing labor to be productive labor. Look at the movement of commodities in production:

When a finished commodity is moved into inventory of a capitalist's own enterprise, and into a warehouse, isn't that part of the labor of producing the commodity, part of the V that is broken down in to a necessary labor time of its own reproduction, and a surplus labor time yielding surplus value to the capitalist?

If that is the case, then why is the same labor now performed during the circulation of the commodity, between its commodity form and its money form, no longer productive?

These workers are not producing a surplus, because they are not producing value- that is, they are not producing anything, they are simply facilitating the exchange process. Instead of producing a surplus, they appropriate a portion of it. If the capitalist could, he would do away with hiring marketing firms and salespeople all together- but he can't. It's the same thing with financial capitalists: they do not produce surplus value, they appropriate a portion of it (interest on loans), or in the case fictitious capital, they make money out of non-productive speculation (stock markets, bonds, etc.).

The distinction was meant to show, clearly, that value and surplus value is produced within the production process and not within the realm of exchange, as many bourgeois economists argued at the time. For the sake of analysis, Marx uses this distinction to show how the dynamics of capitalism produce contradictions even in the process of production and how those contradictions unfold into more antagonisms in exchange, circulation and reproduction.

Just because they are "unproductive" doesn't mean these workers should be ignored or that there is anything inherently "wrong" with them. To a capitalist they can be a barrier to accumulation, but for our purposes they are just another element in the workforce that needs to be unified in the class struggle.

I hope this makes sense.

[S.Artesian]

These workers are not producing a surplus, because they are not producing value- that is, they are not producing anything, they are simply facilitating the exchange process. Instead of producing a surplus, they appropriate a portion of it. If the capitalist could, he would do away with hiring marketing firms and salespeople all together- but he can't. It's the same thing with financial capitalists: they do not produce surplus value, they appropriate a portion of it (interest on loans), or in the case fictitious capital, they make money out of non-productive speculation (stock markets, bonds, etc.).

The distinction was meant to show, clearly, that value and surplus value is produced within the production process and not within the realm of exchange, as many bourgeois economists argued at the time. For the sake of analysis, Marx uses this distinction to show how the dynamics of capitalism produce contradictions even in the process of production and how those contradictions unfold into more antagonisms in exchange, circulation and reproduction.

Just because they are "unproductive" doesn't mean these workers should be ignored or that there is anything inherently "wrong" with them. To a capitalist they can be a barrier to accumulation, but for our purposes they are just another element in the workforce that needs to be unified in the class struggle.

I hope this makes sense.


So the workers operating the locomotives in steel mills moving the molten steel from the blast furnaces to the shaping and stamping plants within the steel mill are not performing productive labor?

And the same employees moving the steel coils to the warehouse are not performing productive labor?

So railroad employees moving 10,000 tons of coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to Chicago are not performing productive labor?

Marx explicitly disagrees with that noting.

The issue is surplus value. If you think those workers are not producing a surplus value, then there labor must be a deduction from surplus value, from the surplus labor time absorbed in production. Me? I don't think so. These workers are definitely, in terms of social reproduction, producing surplus value.

[Primavera]

So the workers operating the locomotives in steel mills moving the molten steel from the blast furnaces to the shaping and stamping plants within the steel mill are not performing productive labor?

And the same employees moving the steel coils to the warehouse are not performing productive labor?

So railroad employees moving 10,000 tons of coal from the Powder River Basin in Wyoming to Chicago are not performing productive labor?

Marx explicitly disagrees with that noting.

The issue is surplus value. If you think those workers are not producing a surplus value, then there labor must be a deduction from surplus value, from the surplus labor time absorbed in production. Me? I don't think so. These workers are definitely, in terms of social reproduction, producing surplus value.

Maybe I didn't word my post correctly. If a worker is performing a necessary function in the production of a commodity, yes they are producing value and most likely surplus value. So a worker moving raw materials from plant to plant is in fact doing "valuable" labor. In the case of marketing, in which the workers are not involved in the production process in any qualitative way, no I don't think we can call this productive labor in any sense.

[turquino]

Transportation sector lowers the turnover time for capital, but I don't think its productive in the sense that industry or agriculture is. Transportation decreases the amount of time a commodity needs to circulate and realize surplus value. When a one of these firms invests in new capital like more semi-trailer trucks, the point is to raise commodity-carrying capacity and therefore circulate more surplus value in the same amount of time. Like marketers and wholesalers, the purpose of transportation is to minimize the time between a commodity's production and its sale.

[S.Artesian]

Transportation sector lowers the turnover time for capital, but I don't think its productive in the sense that industry or agriculture is. Transportation decreases the amount of time a commodity needs to circulate and realize surplus value. When a one of these firms invests in new capital like more semi-trailer trucks, the point is to raise commodity-carrying capacity and therefore circulate more surplus value in the same amount of time. Like marketers and wholesalers, the purpose of transportation is to minimize the time between a commodity's production and its sale.


That's a strong argument. However, when a railroad invests in new capital the point is not to circulate more surplus value, per se. The point is to reduce its costs of production, and actually reduce the necessary labor time in which the railroad workers reproduce their own wage. The "carrying capacity" is the use-value, which is only engaged if it contributes to increasing value appropriated.

Marx, however, explicitly identifies transportation as productive labor.

[ArrowLance]

How does winning a lottery ticket or striking gold relate to this? Clearly no labor is involved but alot of money is gained? :confused:


Value is not created in those situations. Money is not value, it is a means of allocating and redistributing purchasing power, which in a capitalist society is not even mildly correlated with the amount of value a person has participated in creating through work.

The response to the first quote is not completely true. While winning the lottery does not create value (which can not be confused with money) finding gold does. Although the act of finding the gold for the individual may be relatively small, personal labour-time does not affect value only the socially necessary labour-time. The short amount of time it takes for the individual to find the gold is offset completely by the scarcity and difficulty of socially finding the material, use-value may also have some input.

To try and explain in more plain terms;

An individual gets lucky and stumbles upon a vein of gold on a hiking trip, no labour incurred.

But society has had to implement many resources in order to search often unfruitful to find that sum of gold, labour incurred although it is hard to determine a precise amount.

[ArrowLance]

I believe Marx also considers services sold on the market as a commodity. And most certainly storage and distribution are valuable services. Of course the value can be assessed in the same way as any other commodities value is assessed, by the amount of socially necessary labour-power required, although determining the socially necessary amount may be difficult.

[Sir Comradical]

I think they're workers that facilitate market exchange but don't directly produce commodities.