Does emotional labour create real value?

[Cactus]

I always thought physical labour used to create real objects is what creates value, but when I was reading a Laurie Penny article, she explored the idea of emotinal labour and cited Marxist feminist, Moira Weigel and her work, Labour of Love.

Emotional labour, Weigel reminds us, is not just the cleaning and the cooking and the wiping of snotty noses, but the organisation of households and relationships, the planning of marriage and fertility, the attention paid to birthdays and anniversaries, the soothing of stress, the remembering of food allergies – all the work, in short, that goes into keeping human beings happy on an intimate level.
It is more than possible for those who perform emotional and domestic labour to be alienated from the products of that labour, especially when so little recompense is on offer. Emotional and domestic labour is work, and women have been putting up with terrible working conditions for far too long.

[ckaihatsu]

Real production -- as opposed to the machinations and responsibilities of ownership -- is both goods *and* services.

Services may be blue-collar (physical), white-collar (mental), or pink-collar (emotional).

Child care would be a good example here, where outsourcing to professional childcare services would include some economic expectation of pink-collar duties, as in comforting a client's child who may become upset for some reason. This service, on the whole, is a real productive input into the reproduction of labor value (the raising of new generations).

[Cactus]

I fail to see how services provide anything productive, they dont make anything that can be exchanged, same would surely apply to pink-collar surely? Raising children is vital in the basic function of civilisation, this could be said about almost anything, but it doesn't mean child care creates anything productive, as don't a lot of important things that are still necessary for civilisations to function.

Im still reading a lot of Marxist theory, I have a lot to learn, but I thought this was the Marxist understanding of value creation. It seems pretty intuitive to me.

[Wessex Way Monster]

but it doesn't mean child care creates anything productive,

It produces bodies for capital to consume.

[ckaihatsu]

I fail to see how services provide anything productive, they dont make anything that can be exchanged, same would surely apply to pink-collar surely? Raising children is vital in the basic function of civilisation, this could be said about almost anything, but it doesn't mean child care creates anything productive, as don't a lot of important things that are still necessary for civilisations to function.

Im still reading a lot of Marxist theory, I have a lot to learn, but I thought this was the Marxist understanding of value creation. It seems pretty intuitive to me.

It produces bodies for capital to consume.

Yeah, WWM says it, basically -- maybe the example I gave isn't the best since the issue of how to raise and socialize incoming generations is *unresolved* as a globally 'hands-on' societal question.

Currently the nuclear family or extended family does it, of course, but the state also steps-in at times.

If pink-collar-type efforts are forthcoming from the family or state then that's equivalent to *socialization* of some sort, which has to happen in *some* way regardless since we're social animals.

If there are 'a lot of important things that are still necessary for civilizations to function' -- and there are -- then those socially-necessary things are reducible to *labor*, including services like domestic labor for the raising of new generations.

I happen to take an interest in the strengths and weaknesses of possible post-capitalist political economies, and the socialization of the young would have to be done *somehow* then, though most likely not like today:

It is more than possible for those who perform emotional and domestic labour to be alienated from the products of that labour, especially when so little recompense is on offer. Emotional and domestic labour is work, and women have been putting up with terrible working conditions for far too long.

So, since (liberated) labor would directly benefit humanity, post-capitalism, that society would have an objective interest in *minimizing* the amount of work that would be socially necessary for the maintenance of a humane world. For the production of tangible objects or materials the call is for 'full automation' so that machinery will finally benefit *all*, without the realm of interceding exchange-values and the bribes to private ownership of profits.

So if work is to be minimized, how would a socialist- or communist-type society do that for the raising and socialization of the young -- ? The novel 'Brave New World' lampoons this social issue effectively as propaganda but that doesn't eliminate the issue itself.

Just offhand perhaps a post-capitalist more-advanced society wouldn't confer early-age raising onto the biological parents themselves (*gasp*), and/or perhaps it would be able to grant personal social *independence* to young ones at *very* early ages, with the use of physical prosthetics (for mobility), tablet-like button-to-speech interfaces (for communication), etc., to complement the overall world-society openness and post-scarcity general availability of humane resources.

[Sea]

I fail to see how services provide anything productive, they dont make anything that can be exchanged, same would surely apply to pink-collar surely? Raising children is vital in the basic function of civilisation, this could be said about almost anything, but it doesn't mean child care creates anything productive, as don't a lot of important things that are still necessary for civilisations to function.

Im still reading a lot of Marxist theory, I have a lot to learn, but I thought this was the Marxist understanding of value creation. It seems pretty intuitive to me.

Is the cost of the service itself not exchanged? The mechanics of labor's exploitation in the service sector is, if anything, more obvious than that in the production of tangible commodities: The cost of the service (eg, hourly rates in child care) is higher than that which is paid to the person performing it. A nanny is still a wage-laborer, who sells their labor-power and the market value of whose service is higher than that. The difference in this value is the result of their labor.

[Sectarian]

Value is a property of commodities. If it creates commodities, it creates value. If it does not create commodities (domestic labor, etc.) it does not create value.

For those who insist on loading a moralistic, "emotional" content into the word "value," this proposition, of course, will be unacceptable, if not sexist, etc.

But the point of socialism, contrary to the Revolutionary Left, is not to adjust value, but to abolish it.

[ckaihatsu]

Value is a property of commodities. If it creates commodities, it creates value.

If it does not create commodities (domestic labor, etc.) it does not create value.

This is incorrect. 'Commodities' includes both goods *and* services -- like domestic labor.

In economics, a commodity is a marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Often the item is fungible. Economic commodities comprise goods and services.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodity

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For those who insist on loading a moralistic, "emotional" content into the word "value," this proposition, of course, will be unacceptable, if not sexist, etc.

But the point of socialism, contrary to the Revolutionary Left, is not to adjust value, but to abolish it.

I'd like to differentiate between 'exchange value' and 'use value' -- once commodity production has been abolished there would no longer be *exchange values*, but there would still be *use values*.

As long as the revolutionary left is calling, etc., for the *abolition* of *exchange* values then it *is* calling for socialism.

But (liberated) labor value *will* continue to exist, post-revolution, as for the reproduction of labor power going-forward over successive generations of humanity -- it's just that it will no longer be expropriated into private accumulations. Liberated-labor-value will be one kind of *use value*, and it will have to be collectively determined how to be allocated, for effectiveness of effort for all (against any possible tendencies towards favoritism or *elitist* consumption).

This topic came up recently at another thread:

[Y]ou're conflating exchange-value with liberated-labor-value. (Hours-for-hours [...] has *no* explicit or implicit exchange value, while the M-C-M' cycle *does* have exchange value.) (As soon as you're using gold / money / currency, you're valuating labor and its results in terms of *abstract valuations*, which automatically / implicitly produce commodities as a result.)

http://www.revleft.com/vb/threads/19...55#post2875155


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The relevance here is that a post-capitalist society could implement an hours-for-hours type of 'pay-it-forward' reciprocity of liberated labor efforts going-forward. (Not all types of work are the same, though, so I developed a 'labor credits' implementation to take into account the variability of *hazard* and *difficulty* across all types of tasks and work roles.) (See that post and thread for more on that.)

I have a standing concern that, with sheerly voluntary gift-economy-type efforts, a *subset* of the population could wind up becoming de-facto exploited (inadvertently), because the people of that group would be doing more work, consistently, than the rest of the population:

[T]he point is, in a socially egalitarian society that has overcome the class divide, people would face all socially necessary tasks *collectively* -- if there's a *gradient of distastefulness* over all of these tasks, that would then produce a *gradient of unwillingness* among those in the population (less-distasteful = more-willing, and more-distasteful = less-willing).

So in such an even-handed social context who *should* do the more-distasteful tasks -- ?

It shouldn't even be a matter of individual *willingness*, because the society has to resolve these post-capitalist socio-material issues on a *collective*, *consistent* basis, as a matter of hands-on social policy:

If society allowed certain people to be doing the *gruntwork*, *consistently*, it would amount to de-facto *exploitation* because those people's standard-of-living was *reduced* (due to doing distasteful tasks), compared to everyone else's, who *weren't* doing distasteful tasks *at all*.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

I think there are two important concepts to centre in this discussion: commodity fetishism and capitalism as totalizing social system.

First, I think it's important to return to Marx's notion that the commodity form is essentially deceptive - it is a means by which social relations - relations of power between people - present themselves falsely as relations between things. This is crucial for understanding both the waged working class in huge sections of the economy - are grocery store clerks, forklift drivers, paperboys, and street sweepers not workers? In Sectarian's facile formulation they are not, but hopefully we can all see how useless a conception of value-creation this is.

Part of understanding this, and crucial to understanding unwaged labour, is a grasp of capitalism as fundamentally more than a quantitative accumulation of wage relationships - in dialectical terms, that point where the quantity of capital-labour relationships constitutes a qualitative change in social relations and society becomes definitively capitalist. In this context, all relations need to be understood not simply as some sort of biological imperatives (a conceptually problematic notion in any case), but as definitive relationships to/within the capitalist organization of the whole of life. Affective/emotional/reproductive labour needs to therefore be located in terms of class (re)composition, and the reproduction of the working class as a class-within-capitalism. That This work is not directly paid for in many cases (though it often is - e.g. daycare workers, nurses, suicide line operators, sex workers), it is often implicitly paid for through the male wage in the case of traditional nuclear families, child benefit programmes provided by the state, etc. The work of Silvia Federici on this is absolutely crucial , and I recommend checking out this recent interview with her here.