The crucial category used in such discussions is Marx’s notion of productive labour. There are passages, where Marx argues that only wageworkers who produce surplusvalue and capital that is accumulated is productive labour. For example:
Every productive worker is a wage-labourer, but not every wage-labourer is a productive worker. Whenever labour is purchased to be consumed as a usevalue, as a service and not to replace the value of variable capital with its own vitality and be incorporated into the capitalist process of production - whenever that happens, labour is not productive and the wage-labourer is no productive worker. (Marx 1867, 1041)
Or:
Productive labour, therefore, can be so described when it is directly exchanged for money as capital, or, which is only a more concise way of putting it, is exchanged directly for capital, that is, for money which in its essence is capital, which is destined to function as capital, or confronts labour-power as capital. The phrase: labour which is directly exchanged for capital, implies that labour is exchanged for money as capital and actually transforms it into capital. (Marx 1862/1863, 396–397)
Marx’s thoughts on this topic are, however, inconsistent, so there cannot be one “true” interpretation of what productive and unproductive labour is. The interpretation of productive labour that I follow is one that stresses the notion of the Gesamtarbeiter (collective worker).
Marx stresses that work is not an individual process. The more co-operative and networked work becomes, which is the consequence of the technification of capitalism and the rise of knowledge in production, the more relevant becomes Marx’s third understanding of productive labour: productive labour as labour of the collective worker. The notion of the collective worker becomes ever more important with the development of fixed constant capital and productivity (Marx 1857/1858, 707). Marx has set out this concept both in Capital, Volume 1, and the Results of the Immediate Production Process. He argues that all work is productive that is “an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any one of its subordinate functions” (Marx 1867, 644) and that with the development of co-operation an “ever increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept of productive labour” so that “the aggregate worker” creates “an aggregate product which is at the same time a quantity of goods” (Marx 1867, 1040).
Chapter Six | Dallas Smythe and Digital Labour
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Digital Labour and Productive Labour