The Middle/Service Class

[CaptainJackJohnson]

Traditional anarchists such as Proudhon and Marxists don't address the services industry, because it wasn't very developed in their time, but I notice that even in our time many ignore it still.

I'm wondering what opinions others have on its role in capitalist society.

Obviously, taking a Labour Theory of Value approach we can easily see that the service industry, worked by the middle class, is a tool for capitalists.

Because services do not leave an end product, they do not actually create value and therefore act to drain the working class of their limited resources. Services, then, are a tool of capitalism as it encourages two things: firstly, consumption, bringing money to capitalists, and secondly, redistribution, because it involves taking money from the working class and using this money to pay the wages of the middle class (who are in themselves a form of working class who are not involved in manual labour), impoverishing workers further while enriching proprietors.

This is the reason why some members of the middle class are actually able to earn more than the value they could possibly physically create, because wealth is being redistributed to these workers.

Does anyone want to expand on this?

[cyu]

Trickle-down economics from a leftist perspective:

Imagine a king (or a wealthy capitalist, or a guy with a secret money-printing machine) in the middle of a country. This guy has loads of money, so he can buy whatever he likes. His lawyers get rich. His butlers get rich. His bodyguards and torturers get rich. Even the boy who shines his shoes gets a nice Xmas bonus.

So the guy in the middle is like the peak of a giant mountain of money. His hangers-on surround him, slightly down-slope from the peak, but still pretty f**king rich. Those who serve his hangers-on also make a decent living, since his hangers-on can also afford to pay a lot for whatever... and so on down the chain, until at the outskirts of the mountain, you have the dirt poor... who don't have wealthy customers that can drop a year's worth of money on them each day.

In an economy like this, those who are primarily after money try to make their way to the center of the money pile. The closer to the middle they can get, the more money they'll make. However, the closer they get to the middle, it is also more and more likely that their productive efforts are useless, contribute very little to the overall economy, and are merely wasted on the whims of a wealthy few.

In an economy like this, the unscrupulous are rewarded. And those who refuse to sellout live in poverty.

[Blake's Baby]

... the service industry, worked by the middle class...

What?

I can't really see that Eastern European cleaners and students flipping burgers qualify as 'the middle class'.

Someone said the other night, and I thought it was a very good point, that in Marx's time 'service workers' were called 'servants', but otherwise, we have pretty much the same class system as we had then.

[melvin]

The service industry is not "middle class" by any standards.

[Strannik]

I can't see how LTV approach can lead to this kind of conclusion. Factory worker applies labour time to natural resources and gets a usable product. Service worker applies labour time to usable product and prolongs or improves it's usability. Or they apply labour time to labourers themselves and increase their productivity or, from bourgeois POW, exploitability. If service work is not work, then neither is science, arts, sports, health care, education - they don't have an "end product" either. Yet a state without these wouldn't last long in competition with anther modern bourgeois state.

A completely different matter is to say that modern service industry does not serve actual social needs. Yes of course. Like everything in a bourgeois society, it serves those who have money. But this is also true for factory work.

So I see still only a single working class. No reason to split factory and service workers.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

we can easily see that the service industry, worked by the middle class

The service industry is worked by workers, and in many cases they are worse off than workers in more traditional working class jobs.

[LeonJWilliams]

'services' like administration? In countries like England those working in low-level administration make up a large number and as Danielle Ni Dhighe said are often poorer than those in traditional manual labour working class jobs.
A problem though is often the mentality of these people, because they sit at a nice desk in front of a computer they can feel that they are the middle class and that those who are doing the manual jobs are the working class, despite the fact that they may earn more than them. Blue collar/white collar syndrome.

The recent reclassification of class by UK universities in conjunction with the BBC was interesting and offered an interesting test but failed to take into account the relationship with the means of production which is of course still VERY relevant.

[Blake's Baby]

Indeed. Woo-hoo, I have a degree, I've got some cultural capital and have a a high social capital score, but I'm also unemployed so I have no financial capital. I'm 'precariat'.

Test is here (simplified, I think) - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22000973

It's bunk. Really.

[subcp]

Capital's products must circulate to realize their values. Will the realization be complete?

"The question that interests us here is this: Does not a moment of value determination enter in independently of labor, not arising directly from it, but originating in circulation itself?" - Marx, Grundrisse, p.519

To reply to this question, evidently it is necessary to have recourse to the theory of production prices which shows how there can be a variation in value in the course of the circulation process.

-Camatte (except the Marx quotes in the middle), Capital & Community

I don't know whether the labor of retail workers is simply maintaining value at the point of consumption when consumer commodities can be directly turned into money, or if there is a transfer of (added) value through the labor of the last workers to handle consumer commodities (warehouse workers, truckers, shelf stockers, cashiers). But the quote above is interesting to think about on this topic.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Well, service workers do add labor and create value. Popcorn or soda can be shipped in a compact form (kernals, syurup) and then "assembled" by service workers at the point of sale. But more generally, they are just tied into the whole chain of production and distribution and can't really be seen outside of that even if they aren't directly producing. Commodities sitting in a warehouse don't generate sales, so truck-drivers, and service workers are all part of it.

[Narodnik]

What do you think, should socialist advocate banning work positions such as servants, cleaners, bellboy, doorman, and similar, as demeaning?

[Jimmie Higgins]

What do you think, should socialist advocate banning work positions such as servants, cleaners, bellboy, doorman, and similar, as demeaning?

Some "service" work would still probably be needed and wanted by people and I don't think all the work is inherently demeaning.

Certaintly things like doormen or luxury services more geared towards establishing a sense of status could easily be eliminated. I think a lot of janitorial positions could also just be eliminated and turined into a task divided up among the people in that area or workplace. In general - in service and other tasks - I think as soon as people are able to steadily feed themselves and such, there would be a lot of focus on both reducing unneeded labor and reducing unpleasant aspects of some tasks.

If workers want a clean and healthy workspace, then some kind of janitorial work will need to be done. If no one wants to do that as their main task because it's unpleasant and unfufilling, then (since people agree it's a desired thing to have) they will have to figure out other methods either through automation, giving people extra incentive, or dividing up the task so that the unpleasantness isn't all forced onto a few people.

Even if left unchanges, some kinds of service work could be more pleasant simply because power dynamics would be different. People wouldn't look at someone as a "dishwasher" and think, "oh they must not be smart enough to do something else" they will just think, "that person happens to be washing dishes at this moment" because our worth won't be deterimined by our usefulness to the capitalist system or our wages or status.

[Dear Leader]

I'm fairly certain Marx considered maids to be working class. Does that help?

[subcp]

Much of the public sector (which includes a lot of 'service' work) is unproductive labor- it probably falls in a similar category to those who work in 'dead capital' industries (advertizing, the FIRE sector, military industries), but the recourse to a growing public sector at the end of the 19th century coincides with the completion of the world market (through colonialism and imperialism)- the saturation of markets, proletarians expelled from productive (value producing/circulating capital) industries who are absorbed into the repressive-administrative apparatus of the state.

Most of these 'jobs' (which includes mine) would be obsolete and abolished; sectors of the service industry would probably be abolished as well. Custodial work only requires social-moral coercion for people to be 'custodians of the Earth', eco-conscious, and self-conscious of the messes they create (whether in offices, factories, their homes, etc.)- similar to the process that things like recycling entered the social discourse via a moral pressure exerted to influence people to begin doing something. Customer service could probably be phased out as a separate entity from normal social interaction (people who don't know asking people who know who share that knowledge without thought of remuneration). Food production would probably be drastically altered- I have a hard time imagining anything like the current regime of food-service work carrying on long after a communist transformation of society.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Most of these 'jobs' (which includes mine) would be obsolete and abolished; sectors of the service industry would probably be abolished as well. Custodial work only requires social-moral coercion for people to be 'custodians of the Earth', eco-conscious, and self-conscious of the messes they create (whether in offices, factories, their homes, etc.)- similar to the process that things like recycling entered the social discourse via a moral pressure exerted to influence people to begin doing something. Customer service could probably be phased out as a separate entity from normal social interaction (people who don't know asking people who know who share that knowledge without thought of remuneration). Food production would probably be drastically altered- I have a hard time imagining anything like the current regime of food-service work carrying on long after a communist transformation of society.

I don't know, while I think people will try and reduce labor whereever possible, I also think that people will still have a use for "serive" work and in some areas it may be expanded. For example, domestic work currently is only a service for the rich while it's privitized for most of the population and often the unpaid responcibility of women. In the long-run it would be labor-saving to create more communal food service even if this increases the amount of service workers in that area. It likely wouldn't be that people were full-time cooks and dishwashers, but I think communities would want something like communal food services (not to mention increased child-care, increased laundry services, expanded public transportation, more health care serivces). But all this would depend on how people prioritize and organize things. I just think that there is pleanty of "use-value" in service if organized around actually providing a service rather than being either a cheap labor-saving technique for capital or a luxury personal service for upper-professionals and capitalists.

[subcp]

I agree on that point. But it does suggest that service as a separate industry would be abolished- and become integrated into the social activity of 'free humans' in the 'human community' ('geimenwesen'), where the kind of community food services would be a part of nearly everyone's day (as far as helping out, cooking, serving, etc.); I'd imagine that domestic labor would take on truly community proportions and become an informal social activity that is considered 'normal' (helping neighbors with all of these tasks). I've read that Freud was quite interested in early experiments in Soviet Russia with the communal raising of children who had been orphaned by the revolution-civil war, outside of the nuclear family unit. I'd like to think that 'it takes a village' becomes a reality in all of the services which are separated as specialized tasks and unskilled labor today. It's hard to tell what impact things like the nuclear family-isolated rearing of children truly has as far as individual atomization today. Same with average physiological health when it comes to diet, hygiene, domestic living conditions, etc.