Unproductive Labour Research Articles

Human Capital Costs in the Context of Coronavirus Crisis

Human capital is an important motor of business performance. In this context, the costs of human capital that the company spends in its efforts to ensure the development and achieve growth in its performance play an important role. However, in times of crisis and decline of production, labor costs that cannot be eliminated become unproductive. The sensitive area is especially area of the wage costs that the company has to pay to employees and thus they represent not only the loss for the company but also the cash outflow. The article maps the influence of this factor on individual branches of the Slovak economy. Using data on the volume of wages paid and estimates of scenarios for the possible development of the coronavirus crisis, it identifies the most vulnerable sectors in terms of unproductive labor costs.

The Rise and Fall of Unproductive Activities in the US Economy 1964–2015: Facts, Theory and Empirical Evidence

The general idea about unproductive labor and the activities associated with it is that they tend to expand and by expanding, reduce the investible product and the growth potential of the economy, however, little is known about the determinants of their movement. In this study, we take a closer look at the US unproductive labor and activities in general during the 1964–2015 period. As possible determinants of the movement of unproductive activities, we consider the economy-wide average rate of profit, the real interest rate and the degree of capacity utilization. The Toda Yamamoto causality tests, as well as the ARDL econometric model, lend support to the view that the unproductive expenditures and activities are determined by rather than determine the above variables. Furthermore, the error correction term indicates that a long run equilibrium relationship exists, and it is attainable after the passage of not too long a time.

Art in the Service of Generating Surplus Value – On the Work of Art as a (Specific) Form of Capital

According to one of Marx’s classifications, human labour can be divided into productive and unproductive: productive labour produces and accumulates surplus value, while unproductive does not. In his analysis of the field theory, Pierre Bourdieu implied that, by its very existence, a work of art possesses value that generates the accumulation of capital on the market. In this sense, an artistic artefact is considered to be the result of productive labour. Bourdieu writes that, in the intellectual (artistic, scientific) field, priority is given to the symbolic capital, which can be converted into the economic one at any time. Although it is derived from Marx’s theses, Bourdieu’s concept of capital is not consistently based on the Marxist idea of the exploitation of surplus value. However, the French sociologist admits that all capital is essentially based on the economic one, because all other types of capital can be converted into the economic one, which brings Bourdieu’s theory back into the framework of Marxist economism. Fields are arenas in which participants clash over different types of capital, but they are also spaces of struggle for legitimacy and the right to monopolise. On the basis of insights into the relationships of gallerists, curators and critics with the work of artists belonging to the new artistic practice in Croatia in the late 1960s and 1970s, this article will examine the extent to which Marx’s theses on productive and unproductive labour correlate to Bourdieu’s concept of the artistic field and its capital, and how artistic products of the new artistic practice can justify their existence as products of productive labour.

An Autonomist Marxist Perspective on Productive and Un-productive Academic Labour

This text starts with a diagnosis of the inadequacy of the dispossession theory for the analysis of the relationship between capital involved in academic publishing and academic labour. It assumes that it is necessary to develop a Marxian theory of productive and unproductive labour within the field of higher education. For this purpose, an Autonomist Marxist perspective on productive labour is proposed, to facilitate analysis of the contemporary subsumption of academic labour under capital, and to organise resistance against it. The essence of this approach is rooted in an exposition of the two-sided perspective on Marxist categories of the critique of political economy. It is used here to approximate the concept of directly productive academic labour and to indicate its apparent limitations. The next step is to present a view on the systemic productivity of academic labour. This is the only way to address the issue of truly productive academic work in the Marxian sense, and the obstacles standing in the way to its full implementation, the key to which is the smooth functioning of capitalist measurement exercised within the field of science and higher education.

As Condições da Classe Trabalhadora em Atividades Características do Turismo: Especificidades e Tendências Socioprodutivas

This article aims to contribute to the discussion about work in the field of tourism by analyzing the labor interactions established within the production, distribution, exchange and consumption processes. With focus on socio-productive hierarchy organized and created in order to add more direct and indirect value, we present and discuss the concepts of useful productive and unproductive labor with aim at pointing out the dominant social relations in those spaces characterized by ‘comparative advantages’. Through reflection and direct participant observation, with the use of structured questionnaires, we sought to highlight the labor and health conditions of workers in the characteristic areas of the tourism industry, by pointing out the possibilities and limits of labor regulatory actions before not only the State, but fundamentally the sociability increasingly regulated by the market. It is pointed out that the labor conditions in the tourism sector are defined according to certain conditions that allow labor exploitation in relative and/or absolute terms, thus generating bio-psycho-social wear.

The productive-unproductive puzzle in Adam Smith: what have we missed?

This paper returns to Adam Smith's much maligned distinction of productive versus unproductive labour to flesh out a dimension of capital productivity that has been missed by the modern theory of production and welfare. The puzzle lies in Smith's use of a binary measurement scale to suggest opposing productivity, and household welfare outcomes obtained with a durable versus non-durable good. A durable good generates a permanent fund of labour savings and service spillovers over time. This dimension of productivity exists separate from, and beyond, any marginal productivity attributed to capital or labour services within the neoclassical production function. And, it forms the basis of improvements in household welfare that Smith described in the Wealth of Nations – in terms of continual net increases in the consumption-production possibility frontier enjoyed by the household, as a result of service spillovers obtained with a durable good over time. In contrast, no such spillovers are obtained with a non-durable good. A preference-bias for non-durable goods, instead, proves to be welfare-reducing – by having households under-invest and/or fail in maintaining the accumulated stock of durable-goods-as-capital. Both lead to a loss of production-consumption possibilities available within the household economy. An exploration of Smith's concern with ‘unproductive labour‘ brings back into focus the broad set of behavioural traits and ethicallegal restraints that underlie economic progress and have been missed by neoclassical theory.

A Reexamination of John Stuart Mill’s and William Stanley Jevons’s Analyses of Unpaid Domestic Work

Household activities are still little discussed in economics. Several commentators have presented it as the result of an old and persistent nonrecognition of unpaid domestic work’s social and economic value by economists. According to them, the “devaluation” of this work stems from its categorization as unproductive labor throughout the history of economic thought. While, within separate studies, Mill and Jevons have been accused of devaluing household activities assigned to women, no direct comparison of their discussions has ever been made. Yet, such a comparison is particularly enriching. Mill and Jevons are indeed situated at a turning point of the history of economics and the productive/unproductive distinction. The article endeavours to highlight and to clarify the implications of this transition by examining Mill’s and Jevons’s definitions of economically productive activities and, more generally, their conceptions of economics.

The perspective of the overcoming of the social division between the people

The problem of labor division has been discussed actively previously in the philosophical lit-erature. However, during the recent decades, this problem has been getting little attention from the researchers. It makes the understanding of positive and negative trends in the devel-opment of modern society more difficult. The present research aims to reveal the perspective of the overcoming the division of society into the productive and unproductive labor. For this purpose the concept of “labor division” is analyzed, the main stages of evolution of labor divi-sion between the workers of productive and unproductive labor in class societies are analyzed, the premises to overcome this type of social labor division are revealed, and the experience of its negation in socialist society is discussed. A dialectal method as the one allowing to discover the contradictions of social, economic development are realized. The difference is shown be-tween the division of labor as a differentiation of labor activity types and as a social-economic consolidation of large groups of people for economically heterogeneous labor types. The in-evitability of the division of society into the workers of productive and unproductive labor in conditions of manual labor domination and undermining of such labor division in conditions of a large machine industry are depicted. The opportunity of mass unemployment prevailing in conditions of modern economics robotization alongside with the working day reducing is discovered. The compatibility of robotization with the reproduction of social labor division is found. The tendency to the negation of social and economic consolidation of workers for the productive labor after the establishment of Soviet power is characterized. The progress of this tendency through reducing of working day to 7 hours is shown. Labor division overcoming is shown as the result of two counter-processes — the inclusion of workers into the control and rationalization of production on the one hand and the participation of the workers of unpro-ductive labor in fulfillment of productive activity on the other. The connection of the social labor division progress with the restoration of an 8-hours working day is found. The conclu-sion about the future perspective of social labor division overcoming has made.

The Importance of Improving Incentives and Employment Opportunities for Farm Households in Poland

Poland is experiencing the first stages of a period where its active labour force will decline steadily over time. This has raised important concerns with how well labour markets in Poland function, especially those in rural areas where there are still large numbers of households on small farms that have only limited engagement with formal work, and whose farm income is too low to provide an acceptable family income. The result is a high level of rural under-employment that imposes a growing burden on the economy and society, both in terms of unproductive labour and in high transfer payments to these families. There is a clear understanding that reducing the number of small full-time family farms in Poland is desirable as a way to: improve household incomes, address the need for more workers in other sectors, and further enhance the competitiveness of farming. Achieving this goal has been problematic, largely because to date there have been few incentives for these farm families to alter their behaviour. Simply put, the vast majority of small farm households do not perceive that they would be better off by engaging in formal employment. This largely reflects limited job opportunities in rural areas and a significant skill mismatch in local labour markets. But, it also reflects the continued existence of a variety of Polish policies that provide considerable financial benefits to these farm households, including a highly subsidized medical and retirement plan and exemption from income taxes, that significantly reduce the incentive to change behaviour. With a shrinking work force the cost of holding these potential workers in their current situation will only increase over time, but changing these longstanding policies remains a major challenge for the government.

Trabalho produtivo e improdutivo na atualidade: particularidade do trabalho docente nas federais

Resumo Como resultado de pesquisa bibliográfica para tese de doutorado, este texto aborda o debate contemporâneo sobre o trabalho produtivo e improdutivo, a partir das formulações marxianas, com o objetivo de estabelecer considerações para compreender o trabalho docente nas Instituições de Ensino Superior Federais. O tema sugere maior aprofundamento sobre o trabalho docente no contexto atual de novas relações entre capital-trabalho e mais-valia. Divide-se em quatro partes: trabalho produtivo e improdutivo, a partir das formulações marxianas; a forma social em que o trabalho se realiza, apontando o que é fundamental na análise; o trabalho contemporâneo no magistério superior em termos produtivos/improdutivos para o capital; e, por fim, reflexões sobre a relevância das ações coletivas de resistência como mecanismos que podem vislumbrar novos caminhos para a universidade pública e seu coletivo docente.

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

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.

A Micro-Approach for Testing Marx's LTRPF: Evidence from Greece, 2000 and 2009

ABSTRACTThis article develops a novel micro-approach for the empirical evaluation of Marx's law of the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Contrary to the traditional method which uses national macroeconomic data, this approach utilises data taken directly from company reports and accounts. The principal advantage of this approach is that it provides an accurate measurement of the value composition of capital, devoid of the measurement limitations of the traditional method regarding variable capital which stem from the inability to distinguish productive from unproductive labour. A disadvantage, however, is that this approach does not cover the entire national economy. The application of the proposed micro-approach to the ongoing Greek crisis yields results which are congruent with the traditional method and reinforce other recent studies linking the current crisis with low profitability.

Impact of density of population of Indian States on their economic growth

As of 2011, with an estimated population of 1.21 billion, India is the world's second most populated country after China. India occupies 2.4 percent of the world's land surface area and is home to 17.5 percent the world's population. The objective of the paper was to study what changes in SDP of states in 2001 and 2011, changes in Density and Population of states in 2001 and 2011 and to study the relation between SDP and Density. The conclusion that was drawn from the Correlation results in the years 2001 and 2011 is that despite the fact population has grown tremendously over this one decade, the SDP relation with the Density of Population of states has been strongly negative From-0.37 in 2001 to-0.44 in 2011 which signifies that the Population Growth is not that productive and as the Density increases there is heavy fall in the growth of SDP. States with high densities have less growth in SDP as compared to states with low densities because the unproductive labour dampens their growth. And states with high SDP have low densities which signify that areas which are not densely populated have much productive labour force than the densed areas.

Co-creative prosumer labor, financial knowledge capitalism, and Marxist value theory

ABSTRACTSome argue that the “co-creative labors” of “prosumers,” who often work for free on social media sites, represent new types of exploitation insofar that they provide novel ways for capitalists to accumulate surplus value. For others, however, prosumers illustrate how capitalism is now dominated by commercial and noncommercial informational networks that build brand value in innovative ways, especially through “immaterial” relations of communication and information. This article argues that each perspective has limitations. By working from an alternative Marxist perspective the article outlines some of these limitations and then argues that co-creative labor and prosumers are best explored as representing unproductive labor that helps transfer, but not produce, already generated surplus value from the productive to unproductive spheres of the global economy. Through their free labor, prosumers thus have the potential to cut costs for new media companies in the unproductive sphere of the economy. The article further suggests that the “unproductive” actions of prosumers are compatible with a financialized form of knowledge capitalism.

Postoperaistyczne spojrzenie na pracę produkcyjną i nieprodukcyjną w nauce i szkolnictwie wyższym

This text starts with the inadequacy of the dispossession theory for the analysis of the relationship between publishing capital and academic labor; it is necessary to develop a Marxian theory of productive and unproductive labor within the field of science and higher education. For this purpose, a post-operaist perspective on productive labor has been proposed, which makes it possible to analyse the phenomenon of contemporary subsumption of academic labor under capital, as well as resistance against it. The essence of this approach is rooted in an exposition of the dual perspective on Marxist categories of the critique of political economy. It is used here to approximate the concept of directly productive academic labor, as well as to point out its apparent limitations. The next step is to present a view on the systemic productivity of academic labor. This is the only way to address the issue of truly productive academic work in the Marxian sense, and the obstacles on the way to its full implementation, the key to which is the smooth functioning of capitalist measures within the field of science and higher education.

Creative Industries, Value Theory and Michael Heinrich’s New Reading of Marx

This article utilises the new reading of Marx found in the work of Michael Heinrich to analyse the creative industries. It considers the role played in the production of value by the labour that takes place in the sphere of circulation. The specific focus is on creative industries such as graphic design, advertising and branding. It applies Heinrich's conceptualisation of 'social validation' to these sectors. This suggests that valorisation depends upon goods and services attaining commodity status by selling for money. Value is subject to this validation. The capitalist use of advertising, graphic design and branding guarantees the possibility of this validation. Using Heinrich, it reevaluates claims made about the creative industries and cognate fields in three main respects. First, it exposes as inadequate certain Marxist understandings of productive and unproductive labour and the place of circulation activities within this distinction. Second, it refutes autonomist Marxist claims as to the immeasurability of immaterial labour and the redundancy of the law of value. Third, it suggests that creative industries possess a significant role in a capitalist economy blighted by a necessity towards the overproduction of commodities.

Complicating the Labor Market as a Social Institution

Economic analyses of labor markets in the URPE tradition developed several key observations that have challenged mainstream analysis. First was the recognition that production is a social process that enmeshes its participants in conflicted social relationships based on power. Workers and employers meet in labor markets not simply as individuals but as classes. Furthermore, labor markets are segmented systematically by race and gender. The labor process is also divided between productive and unproductive labor. In the context of social structures of accumulation, the labor process and labor markets undergo periodic qualitative changes as capitalism resolves deep crises. These understandings have contributed to challenges to the supposed link between labor productivity and wages and the claimed power of education as a force to dissolve class differences. The paper concludes with a consideration of the role of anti-communism in shaping labor studies in the United States after World War II and a critique of the supposed sharp distinction between positive and normative economics.

Free Labour, Social Media, Management: Challenging Marxist Organization Studies

In this paper we explore how so-called ‘social media’ such as Facebook challenge Marxist organization studies. We argue that understanding the role of user activity in web 2.0 business models requires a focus on ‘work’, understood as value productive activity, that takes place beyond waged labour in the firm. A reading of Marx on the socialization of labour highlights the emerging figure of ‘free labour’, which is both unpaid and uncoerced. Marxist work on the production of the ‘audience commodity’ provides one avenue for understanding the production of content and data by users as free labour, but this raises questions concerning the distinction between productive and unproductive labour, which is central to Marx’s labour theory of value. The Marxist literature on ‘the becoming rent of profit’ allows for a partial understanding of how the value produced by free labour is captured, thereby developing the understanding of the economic dimension of ‘free labour’ as unpaid. It overstates, however, the ‘uncontrolled’ side of free labour, and neglects the ways in which this work is managed so as to ensure that it is productive. We therefore call for a return to Marxist labour process analysis, albeit with an expanded focus on labour and a revised understanding of control associated with digital protocols. On this basis, a Marxist organization studies can contribute to an understanding of the political economy of digital capitalism.

Gardens of Sabotage

This essay explores the self-valorization of work in the context of community gardens to further the discussion toward a grounded theory of time and value, something that has been lacking within Chicana/o studies. Urban community gardens are pivotal to the environmental justice movement, and Chicana/os are playing a central role. This essay begins the process toward a reconceptualization of work, time, nature, food, and the body. It proposes a revolutionary logic of labor as realized through the reframing of time and value that seeks to reconnect community gardeners to the means of their own production and reproduction. Transcending capitalist logic and moving beyond the dialectic of productive and unproductive labor, community gardeners have the potential to transform estranged labor into affirmative labor. By creating gardens of sabotage, communities challenge capitalism by reclaiming the value of work and confronting orthodox notions of economy, work, citizenship, community, and time.

The four 18th century streams on productive labour

This article first recalls our previous research on the original approach on productive labour, which goes from Petty to Genovesi (1767). That approach, being mainly empirical, divided jobs into more or less productive. The other most important approaches came later: Quesnay founded productive labour on surplus, Condillac on utility, Smith on exchange value. All of them gave the concept a more rigorous, but also more rigid shape: jobs were divided into productive or unproductive once and for all. Moreover social utility and productive nature of labour became separated qualities. Smith’s concern was to fight the waste of the aristocrats, which fed unproductive labour and subtracted resources from investment and productive labour. But for Smith public services and intellectual labour are unproduc-tive because their product is not material. So, he puts the seeds of the dissolution of his own theory. The following decades witness a confrontation between the physiocratic and the Smithian approach. In the end the latter prevails, but its inconsistencies emerge.