Why Service Industry Jobs are Productive Labor
Clarifying Confusions About Productive and Unproductive Labor
The vast majority of workers in the United States labor in the service industry. The service industry makes up 79.1 percent of the American working class. Industrial workers, by contrast, only make up 19.28 percent and agricultural workers form a mere 1.62 percent.1 On average, service industry workers make around $31,000 a year, whereas industrial workers do slightly better, making around $37,000.
The term “service industry,” of course, is an abstraction, one that does not take class differences among service workers into account. A vocal group of opportunists, accordingly, have taken advantage of the inherent ambiguity of this term, arguing that the Left should only focus on organizing the industrial working class and should ignore or even oppose the unionizing efforts of service industry workers like baristas, waiters, Amazon workers, delivery drivers, adjuncts, graduate students, and teachers. They conflate service industry laborers with the professional and managerial classes, placing grocery store workers in the same category as lawyers with a private practice. Such an errors are only possible among those who lack a class based analysis.
By calling service industry workers unproductive, these critics direct our attention away from the actual movements of working people, preferring to fetishize middle-aged white men in hard hats. Yet these industrial proletarian purists frequently evoke the name of Marx in their defense, appealing to Marx’s distinction between “productive” and “unproductive labor,” arguing that Marx explicitly excludes workers who provide “services” from the proletariat. Service workers are thus, according to these people, not actually part of the proletariat.
The argument rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of Marx’s economic theory. While Marx does, indeed, exclude “unproductive workers” from the ranks of the proletariat, he would count the modern “service industry” among such productive workers. For Marx, shipping workers, baristas, nurses, and teachers are all part of the proletariat.
What is Productive Labor?
By “productive labor,” Marx does not understand the isolated labor of an individual, but an entire process of valorization. Marx defines the term as follows:
Productive labor is merely an abbreviation for the entire complex of activities of labor and labor-power within the capitalist process of production. Thus when we speak of productive labor, we mean socially determined labor, labor that implies a quite specific relationship between the buyer and seller of labor.2
“Productive labor” isn’t defined by the types of commodities it produces, but by the social relationship between the buyer and seller of labor. The term “productive labor,” for Marx, means labor power purchased by the capitalist in order to create surplus value. Importantly, this includes workers who are not involved directly in the production of commodities. Marx writes:
"It is a misfortune to be a productive laborer. A productive laborer is a laborer who produces wealth for another. His existence only has meaning as such an instrument of production for the wealth of others."3
“Productive labor” has nothing to do with producing specific commodities. Instead, labor is “productive” if the capitalist uses the wage relationship to extract unpaid labor from the worker.
The capitalist process of production does not just involve the production of commodities. It is a process that absorbs unpaid labor, one that makes the means of production into the means for extorting unpaid labor. From the foregoing it is evident that for labor to be designated as productive, qualities are required that are utterly unconnected with the specific content of the labor, with its particular utility or the use-value that in which it is objectified. Hence labor with the same content can be either productive or unproductive.4
For labor to be productive, the capitalist must purchase labor with capital and turn this labor power into surplus value. The same service, accordingly, can be productive or unproductive, depending on the social relations involved. For example, if I hire a photographer, even though they are paid a wage, I am exchanging money for a service. They provide me with a use-value directly and no capital is involved. Yet the same service might also be “productive.” Suppose I hire a photographer from a photography company. In this case, the owner of this company pays this photographer a wage and produces a profit from their labor, meaning that their labor is productive insofar as it produces surplus value. Similarly, if I hire a chef, I pay them for the service of cooking. If I go to a restaurant, I no longer pay the chef. The chef, instead, is paid by the capitalist, who pays them a wage to profit from their labor.
The term “unproductive labor” describes cases where a person sells a service directly to a buyer. In such cases, a simple exchange of C-M (commodity-money) occurs. The buyer pays the worker for the service directly. In “productive labor,” however, rather than paying for a service, the capitalist pays for the labor power of the worker. The capitalist then, while renting the labor power of their workers, offers their services to the customers. Through this process, they accumulate surplus value. The relationship of M-C-M (money-commodity-money) occurs. Marx illustrates this difference as follows:
A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her song for money, she is to that extent a wage-laborer or a merchant. But if the same singer is engaged by an entrepreneur who makes her sing to make money, then she becomes a productive worker, since she produces capital directly.5
We should not fall into confusion, since the working class often purchases services from people directly, and this does not always turn money into capital. For example, if I pay my friend to make me a cup of coffee, I am simply exchanging money for a service. Similarly, if I pay a Starbucks for a cup of coffee, then I am also exchanging money for a service. Both, from the perspective of the consumer, involve purchasing a service.
The situation of my friend and the Starbucks worker, however, are very different from the standpoint of the laborers. My friend sells me the product of his labor, whereas the Starbucks worker does not sell the product of their labor, but rents their labor power to the capitalist. The consumer then purchases coffee, not from the barista, but from the Starbucks corporation. The shareholders of this corporation have invested capital into these coffee shops, purchased raw materials, and profit from the surplus value produced by these employees. The more services they provide, the more use-values they create through unpaid labor, producing increased profits for these shareholders.
Sex work, accordingly, can be either productive or unproductive. If a sex worker sells their services directly to their client for money, this would be “unproductive labor.” If they are providing someone else with profit (e.g. a pimp, an adult film company, etc.), then they are engaged in “productive labor.”
We should not confuse service industry workers with the services provided by the managerial and professional classes (e.g. doctors, lawyers, tenured professors, etc.). As Marx points out: “No one buys medical or legal ‘services’ as a means of converting the money laid out into capital.”6 These are not workers who are exploited to create surplus value, but are professionals offering a service. Nurses, teachers, and adjunct/temporary professors, by contrast, are engaged in productive labor, since they create surplus value for their employers.
Furthermore, just because labor is “unproductive” does not mean it is superfluous or unnecessary for society. It certainly does not mean unproductive labor would be eliminated in a fairer society. On the contrary, productive labor is precisely the source of capitalist accumulation, since “productive” just means wage labor that contains unpaid labor, i.e. produces surplus value. In a fairer society, the working class would keep a larger portion of this unpaid labor, and the surplus would go towards the public good, rather than towards private profits.
The Service Sector and Social Transformation
More and more young people are being thrown into the service sector, including large portions of educated millennials and generation Z. Objectively, the interests of the service industry sector are opposed to the prevailing capitalist order. Wages are decreasing and the cost of living is rising. A segment of young people live off the last remnants of “boomer” wealth. The rest work several jobs underneath the weight of massive debt. Subjectively, the proletarianized, educated segments of society are among the most anti-capitalist. Young people today, increasingly working in the service industry, recognize the need for social transformation. We simple need to develop a theoretically advanced consciousness, one capable of organizing these forces into a major political movement. Thankfully, there are many theoretically advanced organizational groups growing stronger every day.
Whenever self-declared “socialists” attack service industry workers, claiming that they are “not true proletarians,” they fundamentally misunderstand Marx’s distinction between productive and unproductive labor. They are also undermining the most visible segment of the current working class movement, creating divisions within the working class based on bad theory and backwards consciousness. Unsurprisingly, the same reactionaries tend to attack the most subjectively revolutionary portions of society, those who fight against white supremacy and sexual and gender based oppression. Rather than organize the political conscious segments of the working class into a theoretically advanced organization capable of action, they attack service industry workers, rejecting the radical reality and preferring the pure abstraction of an old white guy in a hardhat.
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1043.
Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm
Marx, Capital, vol. 1, 1044.
Ibid.
Ibid., 1047.
Great addition to the conversation, this morning s a very important topic