Marx's Category of Service Labour

Abstract

This paper attempts to clarify some of the main points surrounding Marx's definition of service labour, as presented in the three volumes of Capital , Theories of Surplus Value , and many other works.* This attempt seems to be necessary for several reasons. Firstly the problem of service workers in relation to Marx's categories of productive/unproductive labour has been a topic of discussion among Japanese Marxist economists since the end of the Second World War. Most of the participants in this prolonged debate over the socio-economical implications of these categories agree that the definitional distinction between these two types of labour is of great importance in Marx's overall theoretical framework. However, there has been much disagreement over what it means, particularly over the question of whether labour which does not result in material commodity can ever be productive. The majority have claimed that service labour should be perceived as productive because it creates surplus value as well as value. Attacking the view that productive labour must result in a material commodity, they have tried to prove that any type of labour can be value-creating if it is exchanged against capital. They have argued so by quoting Marx extensively to buttress their claim. Almost every one of them believes that his view is consonant with that of Marx. Curiously none of them admit that a good deal of rethinking is needed on the way in which the notion of service itself is represented in its original context. They don't even seem to care about what Marx himself meant by it. Consequently they fail to pose the proper question: How can we recapitulate Marx's definition of service? With so many shortcomings their arguments are frequently inconsistent with Marx's own writing and sometimes unsustainable in their own right. Second and more important is the fact that there has been a continuing growth of service employment. In the years immediately following the Second World War, the major advanced capitalist economies have undergone unprecedented changes in industrial structuring. A central trend in these changes is described as the shift of labour and capital from goodsproducing industries to However, this sort of description seems to be dubious, because, as R. A. Walker stressed in his article (Is There A Service Economy? The Changing Capitalist Division of Labor, Science & Society , Vol. XLIX, No. 1, Spring 1985), in this type of argument, many disparate phenomena are haphazardly loaded onto a single overburdened concept, services. To avoid such misconceived homogeneity, we have