Productive and unproductive labour and social form: Putting class struggle in its place

Abstract

The categories of productive and unproductive labour have been a source of contention among Marxist scholars since Marx first committed them to paper. This article will offer a critique of both the orthodox and autonomist approaches to this issue, arguing that they constitute transhistorical and analytically inadequate interpretations. In contrast, a social form approach to productive and unproductive labour provides a substantive definition of these categories in relation to the commodity form, and brings class struggle back to the forefront in a theoretically consistent manner.

Tolling academics: Rent-seeking and gatekeeping in the university space

“…As the factors of production so central to the classical tradition of political economy are all given new expression in the neoliberal, financialised, digitised idiom, how can we make a pertinent and meaningful distinction between labour, entrepreneurialism and rent-seeking in a given social context, and what significant implications might spring from such a distinction? We must recognise these categories as ‘open categories, as categories of struggle’ (Harvie 2005: 160; see also Moraitis & Copley 2017: 92).…”

“…The distinction is important because it entails different kinds of critique and different modalities of class struggle (Harvie 2005: 144, 147–148; Welsh 2019a). Although some have been opposed to the distinction (Mandel 1992; Poulantzas 1978a), and others have emphasised its significance (Gough 1972; Meiksins 1981; Mohun 1996; Moraitis & Copley 2017; Shaikh & Tonak 1994), it is nevertheless an important set of coordinates through which to navigate so as to position rent-seeking behaviours in the production and distribution of value and surplus value.…”

“…The importance of these distinctions across the category of labour lies in their implications for critique and struggle (Harvie 2005; Moraitis & Copley 2017), particularly in the Autonomist tradition. In an explicit departure from the Classical Marxist distinction between productive and unproductive labour, it is from the finer distinctions within unproductive labour that labour ‘ un productive of value for capital’ (Harvie 2006: 4), and thus potentially contributory to the non-capitalist commons (see Szadkowski 2019a), can be carved out of labour that is either co-productive or reproductive of labour-power.…”

“…However, in the academic context, how is one to consider the dispossession of surplus from supervised postgraduates by professorial supervisors who lead projects as ‘research capitalists’ (Harvie 2000: 116), or journal publishers who dispossess surplus from the direct producers of commodifiable articles (Welsh 2019a)? In the institutional paradigm, one would rightly consider these ‘entrepreneurs’ to be managerial figures, rather than owners of capital, but the relation that they ‘bear’ is that of the capitalist in the moment of surplus dispossession, either as agent or representative of the capitalist side of the capital–labour relation central to Marxist struggle over the surplus (see Moraitis & Copley 2017: 106–107; see also Gunn 1987). In the institutional paradigm, the nature of this relation seems to become mired in proper nouns, and the bounty to be realised in the abstractions of Marxist political economy are thus lost.…”

“…Following Lapavitsas (2009), as well as the discussion in the previous section, the emphasis here is upon characterising rent-seeking positionalities and how they are established, rather than upon clearly indicating a ‘well-demarcated social group of rentiers ’ (p. 143). When thinking on tolling positionalities, individuals within these social relations ought not to be exhaustively defined by these positionalities, but treated as non-exclusive and non-exhaustive ‘bearers’ ( Träger ) of relations (Marx 1969: 396, 1990: 1043; see also Moraitis & Copley 2017: 93, 97–98, 106–107), which of course adds a problematic nuance to our search for agency and culpability in the jungle of complicity, as well as to our efforts to disentangle rent-seeking from labouring and entrepreneurship.…”