Hi,
This post is inspired by some discussions on other boards.
Various folks have distinguished the productiveness or unproductiveness of workers as helping the determine whether their struggles are revolutionary or important or whatever. The standard contrast here is between factory workers and school teachers or call center workers or house wives (I understanding that I'm conflating this with the distinction between productive labor and reproductive activity but I would tend to see all these activities are converging and for similar reasons).
I would say that the approach of looking towards productive workers for the crucial struggles is common among we would-be revolutionaries but this approach does not take into account the way that the capitalist system is evolving today, which is towards lessening the distinctions between productive and unproductive workers. Factory workers have had at least a more visible history of revolutionary struggle than the latter groups but this doesn't mean the pattern will continue or even that recent history has confirmed it.
My argument is that the modern capitalist system tends to involve less and less direct activity and more and more maintenance of the total infrastructure of production. Such maintenance involves both "education" and nuts-and-bolts activities. "Services" are a large part of even the jobs that are now located in China or India. This situation is characteristic of capital prone to financial crisis and the generation of "fictitious capital" due to the entirety of the social machinery being taken as a massive chunk of capital which must gain its profit through the sale of the labor power of the maintenance workers.
One illustration is help-desk employees. Within something like a phone company or computer-manufacturer, these employees are necessary part of selling a final product or maintaining a productive process - unless a product is usable by the end user, it cannot be sold - support is a necessary component of the commodity. Call center employees form a spectrum with education workers, who, when employed by a large company, are rightly seen as a necessary part of the entire package. Now, state educational employees certainly operate with a different dynamic than corporate trainers but the distinction is becoming fuzzier.
Now, you could indeed say that help desk employees, trainers and teachers are all have an indirect relation to production, characteristic of a professional stratum, compared to those who "really" do things split wood or welding fenders on automobiles. But when "productive" work moves from welding fenders on cars to debugging the software of the robot that welds the fenders on the cars, then the distinction between production and reproduction seems fuzzy at best to me. The help desk and the training is integral part of keep the software on the robot working.
Just as much, the integration of capital also makes the distinction between salesman, clerk and assembler a bit fuzzy. Is the grocery bagger non-productive? What about the truck driver taking food to market? What about the deliver van operator taking food to yuppies who ordered over the internet? Is a gas station pumper productive when customers are quite capable of pumping their own gas?
Computer programmers certainly create a "thing" yet the programmer has historically had a middle class, individualistic perspective. Indeed, within the corporate IT, programmers are the relative top of the heap within non-managerial employees whereas help desk employees tend to be towards the bottom. It is interesting that numerically controlled machine programmers as a group are drawn from machinists and come out of the blue-collar workforce, yet their actual activity is essentially the production of programs similar to "standard' programmers.
Recapping, I view that capital tends to merge production and reproduction. There certainly was distinction between productive and non-productive in, say, the 19th century but I view this distinction as an artifact of capital first appearing as an alien entity invading society whereas it presently appears has occupied the entirety of social space - a progression which is natural to the way capital operates. Just as much, the distinctions between productive and unproductive labor, whether based on accounting, teaching-versus-real-activity or mental-versus-manual-labor, are lessening with more and more wage laborers placed on the fuzzy "unproductive" side of the equation.
In saying this, I wouldn't argue that the bulks of apparently non-productive labor is indeed useless, futile, pathetic and ridiculous. That seems a natural corollary of capital having solved the problem of bare survival (at least in-potentia).
It sometimes argued that the distinction is between those workers who can stop society's activity and those who can't. one interesting example in the question of "stop society" is - the Piqueteros. In Argentina, these were those utterly excluded from the production and consumption process. By this exclusion, they reached the condition of having absolutely nothing to lose and thus were willing to lay down their lives to stop the circulation of traffic, which equals the circulation of capital and commodities. The usual categories of critical-to-production and unimportant-to-production would treat the excluded as within the unimportant yet this dynamic went in dialectical full circle and the excluded were crucial for stopping production. This dialectic might not reproduce itself but it is still interesting to see how proletarianization creates contradictions in capital's methods of dividing the working class.
Anyway, I invite folks to try to formulate a critical distinction between productive and unproductive labor. It is a crucial topic for debate.
Best Wishes,
Red
Best topic in a while! I don't have time to type a lot right now, but the first thing I'll say is that it's crucial that we not look at "unproductive" work as something that simply replaces the "productive," but rather at how the relationship between labor that's indirectly and directly productive of commodities changes through history.
Waged "service sector" work sometimes comes out of unwaged work, but in other instances it's work that was originally part of a job that's stripped out of the labor process and allocated to a lower-paid worker.
Also entire regulatory / stabilizing / maintenance functions of production have been outsourced in a similar manner and are industries unto themselves (from janitorial services to insurance!).