I'm continually amazed at my blog traffic. The little counter says I've had 5000 visitors. This, after a week I barely wrote at all (too busy thinking important Marxist thoughts, of course!) I feel honoured and obligated to provide some pithy thoughts. Particularly since, in my last tutorial, we were discussing the market and students came to the consensus that the only way to get security is to invest and buy property. I treated the topic gingerly; the Marxist in me wanted to say "This system only allows advance through the exploitation of others!" But the teacher in me was just happy to have people participating. I think I erred on the side of caution - university is one of the few places students will encounter anti-market arguments, and I have a responsibility to provide them. So, to make up for it:

Are you being productive?

Fascinating... my work is getting other people to work.

This is the question of capitalist work. 'Lazy' is an insult in our society, though that hasn't stopped many anarchist writers from proclaiming its virtues, and of course, revolutionary socialist Paul LaFarge, in his famous pamphlet The Right To Be Lazy. Work under capitalism destroys the spirit and the body; Marx was very clear about this, but you don't have to read him to figure it out - any job teaches that quickly enough. In response to soul-crushing, mind-numbing labour, not working is an act of rebellion; organized, it becomes a political tool against capital, through a strike. And while 99% of strikes are fought to improve the conditions of work, not revolutionize them, there's a seed of transformation in each - as soon as people step outside the work routine, new ways of interacting spring up. New possibilities of work, based not on production quotas but on cooperation, become possible. What can make strikes such positive activities (irregardless of whether they end in victories or defeats) is the glimpses they provide into a different world.

To understand this, we have to clarify four concepts. Work, human productive activity, produces things with two different ends, or values:

1) Use-value - the definite purpose and quality embedded in a thing. My computer's use-value is that it allows me to write.
2) Exchange-value - a quantitative measurement of the human labour embodied in a thing. That's what allows commodities to be exchanged: their equivalence, in terms of how much labour time went into them. But to do so, a thing is stripped of anything useful and becomes abstract. My computer's exchange-value is $1000.

Ohhh... so much use-value...

In capitalism, we work in order to create exchange values. We don't make things, or provide services, to use the thing or service itself. We do it so those products can be exchanged and sold. The useful products become commodities. We get alienated from those useful properties, and work for abstract wages instead. The world becomes a fantasy, in which commodities and money move themselves - dollars 'go up', futures markets 'decline'. We lose an understanding of our own, human agency - capitalist production strips it from us.

Earlier I talked about teaching, and what kind of work it was. I've since clarified it further.

3) Productive labour - work that produces surplus value for capitalism.
4) Unproductive labour - work that is not involved directly in producing surplus value. Today, the term unproductive is pejorative. This is a confusion of use & exchange value. Unproductive labour still has particular uses, But it's not central to capitalist production itself.

An example:

a) If I taught in a private school, I would produce surplus value for the person who owned the school. I am labouring productively.
b) I teach in a public school. I'm training students to be better workers, I'm supplying them with grades they can use to sell themselves, I'm reinforcing ideological hegemony. But no boss is directly benefiting from my labour.

The same work can be productive in example a), and unproductive in example b). It's not just the type of work that matters, but where it exists in the social relations of production.

Productive labour

A post-revolutionary necessity

Even in the 19th century, Marx recognized that capitalism was over-developed. It had created so much wealth that it didn't need to reinvest it in the means of production. It could spin it off unproductively, into servants for the rich - but also into university teachers, lawyers, administrators. Again, this isn't an insult: teachers and administrators are still part of the working class.

However, we leave the realm of political economy, when we question why there has to be such a large chunk of people employed unproductively. Why can't we all create surplus value that's put towards social needs? I'm not suggesting we stop teaching and organizing - a communist society needs those more than ever. But in capitalism, those professions have to reproduce capitalist social relations. (I think law always does, since it's about who controls private property, which wouldn't exist in communism. But I'm open to correction on this.) Communism could abolish war & war-makers, tax bureaucrats, banks. For everything else not immediately involved in productive labour, communism could eliminate the barriers which make 'professional' jobs a privilege of the elite. It would de-alienate knowledge production. Marx in The German Ideology:

in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.

Unproductive labour

All that labour used to create exchange value, would finally be put to creating use-values. It would be de-alienated. As Paul LaFarge writes,

The capitalist class once relieved from its function of universal consumer will hasten to dismiss its train of soldiers, magistrates, journalists, procurers, which it has withdrawn from useful labor to help it in consuming and wasting.

Right, back to consuming and wasting - I mean, research.