"The distinction between productive and unproductive labour is, therefore, one between labour which contributes to the self-expansion of capital and labour which does not. Marx's main example of the latter is that of domestic servants, the largest single category of workers in Victorian Britain, employed out of the revenue of the middle and upper classes. The precise implications of Marx's theory of productive and unproductive labour are not wholly clear. However, the interpretation most consistent with the version of the theory expounded in Capital volumes 2 and 3 suggests that only those wage-labourers involved in the production of commodities (including their transportation to the point of final consumption) are seen by Marx as productive labourers.

 

"Marx argues, for example, that time devoted to the circulation of commodities -- buying and selling, book-keeping and so on -- is a pure cost to capital, creating no surplus-value. A commercial capitalist who invests in these activities merely creates a claim to the surplus value created elsewhere, and thus reduces the general rate of profit. If the capitalist employs wage-labourers 'this advance of capital creates neither product nor value. It reduces pro tanto [to such an extent -- RL] the dimensions in which the advanced capital functions productively.' However, wage-labour employed to transport goods does create surplus-value, since 'the use-value of things is only materialised in their consumption, and their consumption may necessitate a change of location of these things, hence may require an additional process of production in the transport industry.'

 

"If we accept productive labour thus conceived as defining the working class, then only wage-labourers in extractive, manufacturing, and freight industries would form the proletariat. On such a view, the working class would apparently be narrowed down to its nineteenth-century stereotype of male manual workers.... This approach contradicts that pursued by Marx in Capital. Marx himself insisted that many white-collar workers were themselves productive labourers. This was a result of the increasing socialisation of production, which meant that:

 

'the real lever of the overall labour-process is increasingly not the individual worker. Instead, labour-power socially combined and the various competing labour-powers which together form the entire production machine participate in very different ways in the immediate process of making commodities.... Some work better with their hands, others with their heads, one as a manager, engineer, technologist, etc, the other as overseer, the third as manual labourer or even drudge. An ever-increasing number of types of labour are included in the immediate concept of productive labour, and those who perform it are classed as productive workers, workers directly exploited by capital and subordinated to its process of production and expansion.' [Callinicos is here quoting from the Results of the Immediate Process of Production -- Productive and Unproductive Labour, published in the Appendix to the Penguin edition of Capital Volume One, i.e., Marx (1976), pp.1039-1040, although the version on-line is clearly a different translation. Italic emphases in the original published version, although Callinicos has emphasised sections of this passage differently.]

 

"Thus, all those who form part of what Marx called 'the collective worker', the complex division of labour involved in producing commodities, are productive workers, even if they do not work with their hands. Moreover, there is no evidence to suggest that Marx regarded only productive workers as forming the proletariat. On the contrary, his analysis of commercial employees, whom we have already seen he did not believe produced surplus-value, suggests the opposite. Marx writes:

 

'In one respect a commercial employee is a wage-worker. In the first place, his labour-power is bought with the variable capital of the merchant, not with money expended as revenue, and consequently it is not bought for private service, but for the purpose of expanding the capital advanced for it. In the second place, the value of the labour-power, and thus his wages, are determined as those of other wage-workers, i.e., by the cost of production and reproduction of his specific labour-power, not by the product of his labour-power.' [Callinicos is here quoting Capital Volume Three; i.e., Marx (1998), p.291 -- RL.]...

 

 

"If we accept this reasoning, then we must reject the 'narrow' definition of the proletariat as comprised only of productive workers. Ernest Mandel offers the following broad definition: 'The defining structural characteristic of the proletariat in Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the socio-economic compulsion to sell one’s labour-power. Included in the proletariat, then, are not only manual industrial workers, but all unproductive wage-labourers who are subject to the same fundamental constraints: non-ownership of means of production; lack of direct access to the means of livelihood (the land is by no means freely accessible!); insufficient money to purchase the means of livelihood without more or less continuous sale of labour-power'. [Callinicos is here quoting Ernest Mandel's Introduction to the Penguin Edition of Capital Volume Two -- RL.]...

 

"The implication of the previous section is that the proletariat should broadly be identified with the mass of wage-labourers. It follows that the present century has seen a considerable expansion, rather than a decline in the size of the working class...." [Callinicos (1983), pp.87-94. Several paragraphs merged.]