there’s a guy that i’m mutuals with on other social media who’s on the young side, like just out of college, and he’s figuring out what he thinks about politics. he’s pretty smart and hangs around cool marxist(-leninist) people, but he’s definitely trying to figure out stuff on his own, which is really cool and he’s critically engaging with stuff well.
however, it seems like he’s seen a lot of patsocs and ACP members bring up weird corners of Marx’s writing to try to justify their positions. the particular case he brought up recently was about an ACP guy on twitter using the productive vs unproductive labor distinction to call baristas (you know, people who make coffee for usually really low wages) enemies of the working class because they are unproductive labor. my friend was worried that this kind of weird nonsense argument was necessary for marxists in general. me and some other people explained that no, the ACP guys are picking weird bits of Marx to try to justify their reactionary bullshit and we actually mostly focus on class and not this other stuff. so like no harm done here, but it makes me wonder how often those kind of things go unchallenged in other people’s experience.
Calling service economy work unproductive labor isn’t picking a weird corner of Marx’s writing, it’s completely misreading it.
The distinction in Marxism between productive/unproductive labour has nothing to do with producing things, the distinction is about whether the product of labour can be further profited off of, that is whether it can still be part of the M - C - M’ cycle. According to the definition of unproductive labour, most “service industry” jobs today would fall into that category. Marxism doesn’t actually have a “service industry” category and it does not use the capitalist categories of labour activity.
Productive labour: making a commodity to be sold later, or parts of commodities to be further laboured on and sold down the line. For example, making clothes, zippers, direct-to-TV movies, etc.
Unproductive labour: providing/selling a commodity or service for consumption. For example, massage therapy, selling roasted corn in the street, a plumber fixing a kitchen pipe, etc.
A bakery that bakes and sells bread to a customer is engaging in unproductive labour, while a bakery that sells to a store is engaging in productive labour.
I think in a marxist sense services are simply considered commodities: a product, though intangible, whose purpose for existing is to be bought and sold.
However, I think massage therapists and plumbers are productive because they create profit and thus accumulation of capital for their employer (or for themselves if they’re self-employed).
We look at them from the POV of who hires their work, e.g. the client booking an appointment, but the rendering of services is what matters and what creates profit: a massage company charging 100$ for a massage and paying their therapist 60$ per massage makes a 40$ profit off every client, rendered possible by the therapist’s labor.
The bakery in your example requires both types of labor: the bakers are productive because they imbue value in a commodity, but the cashiers are not because they don’t directly create profit, they turn the value of the commodity into its money-form – from what I understand of removedshott’s video “Are barristas productive?”. If the bakers are also the cashiers as is often the case in this late-stage capitalism period, they perform both types of labor: some of it is productive, some of is unproductive.
We can take another example: a capitalist hiring a chef. In either cases, the chef produces a cooked meal with his labor-power. If the capitalist hires the chef to cook a meal for himself (and provided the chef didn’t come through a temp agency or whatever else but was directly hired as they used to do back in Marx’s days), then the labor was unproductive: it didn’t generate more capital. If however the capitalist hires the chef for his restaurant, the labor is the exact same, but it becomes productive because the meal is sold for a profit.
You know what? I honestly don’t know as much as I’d like about productive/unproductive labour as it applies to industries in general, and services in particular. So instead of coming up with some kind of half-baked answer I’ll go and read about it.
I recommend removedshott’s video! He’s a terf but he’s a very good economist
I’ll watch it. I also found a recent (2023) paper by two economists/Marxists in China, among other things.
I think with the hindsight we now have we can formally say that patsocs are distorters of marxism (Lenin had to contend with them already in his time!) and their role is to drive people away from marxism-leninism. There’s a reason they are almost entirely indistinguishable from fascists and rally all the most insufferable and toxic persons together. I also think there’s a reason the “ACP Chapters” that apparently exist have so far only done garbage clean-up instead of organizing reading groups, roundtable discussions or seminars and participating in protests. If they do it, they’ve never advertised it. Garbage clean-up is something any lib NGO can and already do.
They cherry-pick the most obscure excerpts and give it the most tortured reading to make arguments. In this way they seem like authoritative sources, giving you passages from books directly. Most of the time they cut out the very next paragraph that disproves their claim entirely. They attach themselves to these figures and also to other orgs so that they get authority by proxy. It’s very blatant once you notice it.
Marxism isn’t fundamentally difficult or obscure. It’s actually the opposite, it demystifies the world. It can’t be a proletarian ideology if it reproduces the behaviors of bourgeois ideology: that of being inaccessible in language, requiring years and years of studies to even start to grasp, requiring the reading of earlier philosophers in an academic manner (pouring over every word), and attaching itself not to the substance – despite what patsocs say they do – but to the form.
I see this in “academic” marxists too (I’m putting it in quotes because I’m not sure if they’re in academia or just very invested). They pour over every word, arguing over whether the inclusion of “the” changes the meaning of the sentence, whether you need to read Hegel to properly get Marx*, etc. They get bogged down into debates that surely interest them and their circle, but has very little bearing on the struggle.
Marxism is not a dogma passed down from Moses, and in a way it sucks to have to write that because I thought that whole topic had been settled and abandoned by 2021. Marx made mistakes too, he worked with the information he had available to him, and maybe on some days he was feeling a bit under the weather and didn’t write something properly while he was fleeing from the police! The gist of it is perfectly understandable without having to pull out oracle bones to interpret every single sentence he wrote and the order he put the words in. We are also capable of reason, the same reason Marx used, and make our own conclusions too.
It’s like, what are the actual implications of baristas doing “unproductive” labor? They’re attaching an emotional meaning to it, but unproductive for Marx only means that the labor does not reproduce capital, the M-C-M’ process is interrupted. So what’s the problem? That capitalism has bullshit jobs? That some people make minimum wage undeservedly? To patsocs, the problem is fabricated entirely: baristas perform unproductive labor and thus are undeserving of solidarity. But petit bourgeois business owners are actually productive [because they reproduce capital, a very capitalist thing to say lol] according to them. They’re not doing anything novel or even very clever, they’re just taking a body of theory and turning it upside down to say the opposite. Anyone can do that, Twitter blue checks have been doing it with Nietzche for years already.
On the barista thing, it’s funny because I saw patsocs arguing that you should try to “buy the latte, turn around and sell it to someone else”, implying nobody would buy a latte from you. They’re reinventing the subjective theory of value lol.
But to detach your friend from patsocs I would actually probably focus on their grift instead of their theory. This user on Twitter https://x.com/jonnysocialism has spent a lot of time exposing patsocs’ ties. You can see on his account the metamorphosis of Edward from Midwestern Marx into an actual fascist in real time. Hinkle’s ties to the feds too. I don’t think there’s a lot on Haz out there, he seems more like the muscles of the operation than the brain tbh. And then of course go into Larouche, there’s this podcast episode that’s pretty good https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/larouche and we transcribed/rewrote it for Larouche’s ProleWiki page if he prefers reading (said no one ever). It doesn’t go into the patsocs’ ties to Larouche though, for that you’ll need other sources. Probably just using search engines (reddit/twitter/google) and typing “Hinkle Larouche” or “Haz infrared Larouche” will yield results, or replace Larouche with the Schiller Institute which is for a fact presided over by his wife, from their website directly: https://schillerinstitute.com/inalienable-rights-man/.
Hinkle and Haz have talked about Larouche positively before, plenty of times, and Maupin was even selling his books (Maupin is now a moonie because I think even the larouchites wanted to distance themselves from him after the scandal lol).
*To add to the asterisk: read Hegel if you want to and you like philosophy, then read idealists and the Ancient Greeks too… again if you like philosophy and want to learn it deeply. I just don’t think it’s realistic to expect anyone, even cadres, to become doctors in philosophy, economics, history and socialist history to even be considered an “effective” marxist.
Johnny is such a bad faith reader.
literally a post from Hinkle saying “give women time off for their periods” but I guess that’s patriarchy because it suggests inferiority. so I’m only a communist if I tell my wife “suck it up buttercup”?
news flash: pain and stress alter thinking. it’s why I can’t do math well for a minute after I hit my finger with a hammer.
other news flash: feminism can morph into strange toxic substances, just like masculinity.
It’s like, what are the actual implications of baristas doing “unproductive” labor? They’re attaching an emotional meaning to it, but unproductive for Marx only means that the labor does not reproduce capital, the M-C-M’ process is interrupted. So what’s the problem? That capitalism has bullshit jobs? That some people make minimum wage undeservedly?
But this is already ceding too much ground to their bunk analysis, because baristas are obviously productive labor. They make and serve coffee, meaning they are important in getting money out of the cafe (or whatever), the coffee beans, the coffee machines, etc., even if we totally discount the possibility of excess value being extracted from their labor and treat them like instruments of production. They’re part of the circuit, or they wouldn’t be employed!
The thing that irritates me the most is the way they just kind of throw all the cultural causes I consider important under the bus.
(I.e. buying into conservative culture war dreck and high-control cultural norms uncritically)
It can’t be a proletarian ideology if it reproduces the behaviors of bourgeois ideology: that of being inaccessible in language, requiring years and years of studies to even start to grasp, requiring the reading of earlier philosophers in an academic manner (pouring over every word), and attaching itself not to the substance – despite what patsocs say they do – but to the form.
Lmao having a vocabulary is bourgeoisie. You seem to have a an anti-intellectual view of academia. Tell me, do you think the world is understandable to a proletarian because the world carries with it an affectation of simplicity that can work with the proletarian character, or because proletarians simple must engage with the world?
Also it’s just wrong to say academics pour over every word. Do you think people can read hundreds of books that way and get anywhere? Please return your caricature of academics to wherever you found it.
That’s not what I said at all 👍
They’re fascist distorters of Marxism-Leninism.
I used to think that these sorts of people were hurting the cause but over time I realized no, not really. Mostly because the kinds of people who engage with that sort of dialogue try to use it as a weapon, saying things like “see THIS communist says x y or z and that means YOU’RE saying x y or z too.” Then you try to engage with that conversation and one of two things happens. Either you explain no, that isn’t what we believe and here’s why and they listen, or they shout NO TRUE SCOTSMAN at you and pretend like if anyone ever identifies as anything, that means everyone that also identifies as that must be the same. The former group isn’t negatively impacted by patsocs because the former group aren’t fucking stupid, and the latter group will never engage with you or anyone seriously no matter what you do, so why bother wasting your time.
This lesson helped me a lot once I realized it. Only engage with people who will actually earnestly engage with you. The others are someone else’s problem or require a different organizing strategy.
The former group isn’t negatively impacted by patsocs because the former group aren’t fucking stupid, and the latter group will never engage with you or anyone seriously no matter what you do
This is good to keep in mind, but I think you can still say Patsoc types hurt the cause. The problem is most people who are exposed to their stuff don’t engage with anyone about it, so there’s no opportunity to have the sort of discussion you describe (where you can reach the reachable, and the unreachable respond predictably).
A bunch of reachable people get turned off by this/get misinformed about socialism by it, and then we never hear from them (and get to explain what this shit is and why it’s bad) because they don’t talk to anyone about it the way most people don’t talk to anyone about stuff they read online.
