For economists today, therefore, the question of “productive" or “unproductive" labor has lost the great interest which it had for the early bourgeois economists, just as it has lost interest for capitalist management itself. Instead, the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applied to labor of all sorts, even labor which has no productivity. It refers, in bourgeois parlance, to the economy with which labor can perform any task to which it is set by capital, even those tasks which add nothing whatever to the wealth of the nation. And the very idea of the “wealth ofnations" has faded, to be supplanted by the concept of "prosperity," a notion which has nothing to do with the efficacy of labor in producing useful goods and services, but refers rather to the velocity of flow within the circuits of capital and commodities in the marketplace.
The enormous quantities of socially useless labor that enter into this circulation, therefore, are in the minds of the modern ideologists of capital merged into the general processes of labor, just as they are so merged in the minds of the managers. All labor processes are adjudged equally useful—including those which produce, realize, or divert the surplus. The productive and unproductive forms of labor are mingled, in individual firms and in the economy as a whole, on an equal footing. And the organization of labor in the unproductive aspects of corporate activity follows the lines laid down in the productive sector; the labor of both sectors becomes, increasingly, an undifferentiated mass.
In early capitalist enterprises the unproductive labor employed in small quantities was, generally speaking, a favored stratum, closely associated with the employer and the recipient of special privileges. Those who worked with him in fulfilling the sales, accounting, speculative, and manipulative functions represented to him associates in the guarding and expansion of his capital as capital, in distinction from those in production who represented his capital only in its temporary form as labor. The few who kept his books, sold his products, negotiated on his behalf with the outside world, and in general were privy to his secrets, hopes, and plans, were in fact associates in the exploitation of productive workers, even if they themselves were only employees. The productive worker, on the other hand, represented the social relation between capital and labor, since this worker was the “direct means of creating surplusvalue." “To be a productive worker is, therefore,"Marx wrote, “not a piece of luck, but a misfortune."² Those who aided the capitalist in the circulation of his capital, the realization of his profit, and the management of his labor, gained privileges, security, and status from this function, and thus to be an unproductive worker was in itself a piece of good fortune that contrasted with the misfortune of the worker in production.
Now, however, marked changes have occurred in the relations between productive and unproductive workers within the corporation. On the one hand, the process of productive labor has become, more than ever before, a collective process. It is only the body of productive workers which fashions the ultimate product; each worker can no longer be considered productive in the individual sense, and the definition of productive labor applies only to the body of workers taken as a whole. On the other side, the unproductive labor of the corporation, having been so tremendously expanded, has been given the same twofold structure as productive work by the capitalist division of labor. The individual functionary, closely associated with the capitalist, has, as we have described, given way to the department or division of the corporation, in which only the heads remain associated with capitalist management while the rest occupy positions akin to those of workers in production. Thus while, on the side of productive labor, the individual worker loses those characteristics as producer of a finished commodity which made him or her a productive worker, and retains those characteristics only in the mass, on the side of unproductive labor a mass has been created which shares in the subjugation and oppression that characterizes the lives of the productive workers.
The unproductive functions, having evolved from special and privileged occupations closely associated with capital into divisions of corporate activity or even into capitalist “industries" separate and complete in themselves, have now produced their armies of wage-workers whose conditions are generally like those of the armies of labor organized in production. And just as, for corporate management, the problems of the organization of the labor process in production and outside production become increasingly similar, just so for workers the distinction between the various determinate forms of labor punch press or typewriter, key punch or assembly line, stockroom or filing room, machine tool or bookkeeping machine—become less and less significat. In the modern office and factory the gap between the forms and conditions of labor that loomed so large in the early counting house and shop now dwindles. Although they were at one time a means of escaping the “misfortune" of being a productive worker, the unproductive occupations have, in the armies of labor employed at their bases, for the most part lost their attractiveness and become merely another form of exploitation. From being privileged positions in which one could to a small extent share in the benefits derived by capital from productive labor, they have become mere cogs in the total machinery designed to multiply capital. And this remains true despite the fact that, technically speaking, all those who do not themselves produce commodity values must perforce consume a portion of the commodity values produced by others. In the modern corporation, and for the mass of labor which it employs, this distinction has lost its social force as a line of division between proletarians and middle class: that line can no longer be drawn as roughly corresponding to the division between productive and unproductive workers, but must be inscribed elsewhere in the social structure. Thus Marx's aphorism must be modified, and it must now be said that to be a wage-worker is a misfortune.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Productive and Unproductive Labor
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