The Proletariat and the Problem of Unproductive Labor
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- čas přidán 28. 10. 2023
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My Twitter: / philosophycuck
CritiqueOfPoleEcon’s Substack page: substack.com/@criticofpolecon
Article on productive labor: open.substack.com/pub/critico...
Thank you to the following proletarians for their work footage:
Daniel Bigelow (Warehouse work): • Warehouse work
ConnorDoesCoffee (Starbucks work): • POV- A solo barista wo...
NFZ Productions (Amazon work): • DAY IN THE LIFE Workin...
Stephen Patula (McDonalds work): • McDonald's POV: Lunch ...
Eugene (Bus driver): • POV Bus Drive: 2001 Gi...
FastFoodPOV (Five Guys work): • Working at Five Guys (...
Marx texts cited:
Productive and Unproductive Labour: www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
Theories of Surplus Value: www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
Capital, Vol. 1: www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
Capital, Vol. 2: www.marxists.org/archive/marx...
this is why i left twitter. the absolute contempt these isolated armchair weirdos hold you in is utterly insane. "if you don't understand this, you never will". like imagine saying this at a picket line? or in an organising event. they are so far up their own ass about how correct and amazing they are they've forgotten to talk like real people in the real world.
True. The biggest problem socialism has is the socialists themselves. It is insane how arrogant and contemptuous many are. It often feels like they want to stay in the minority so they can keep looking down on the majority. Socialism would be so much more successful if one couldn't simply point at the Socialists and say "Look, what assholes they are. Don't listen to them."
It would be an insanely out-of-touch and elitist thing to say even if their position was correct-- and it's even more ridiculous, given that their position was wildly wrong.
Imagine putting _"if you don't understand this, you never will"_ anywhere in the abstract of a paper you were publishing. This mentality is so contemptuous that it hardly even deserves the second glance of the thoughtful, yet it represents a dangerous line of thought which is harmful to the cause of revolution
These are the type of people who will claim they are trying to unite people and make the world a better place whilst simultaneously turning anyone slightly different to them into an enemy. They just want to fuel their superiority complex and seek out any tidbit of information that lets them feel smarter than others.
These attitudes can be the most dangerous, because they mimic the rhetoric and claim to be working in good faith whilst simultaneously giving into their base urges to simply start tribal conflicts for their personal satisfaction. This can lead well intentioned people down the wrong path much more easily than being faced with an obvious counter-position
Genuinely its the most questionable thing. Do they just expect everyone to miraculously agree with them? If you're a socialist in a primarily capitalist dominated culture, are you expected to just sit around and hope everyone else becomes a socialist too? Do you not do anything to organize, educate, and increase the consciousness of the proletariat? What is the game plan of these people? The mindset of "If you don't understand this, you never will" is so self defeating. Genuinely how do you expect the proletariat to make a change if you never put any effort into it?
society does not need professional twitter philosophers
That's why they don't think they deserve to be paid for it
That's why we do it for free
nor their equivalent on CZcams, selling easy Kumbayah system magically solving all of society's problems criticizing current capitalist society before a sponsorship segment.
@@Game_Hero lol and all while the economy is already socialist
@@PierreTruDank Random anecdote. Once I saw the website for an anarcho-syndicalist party (or anarcho-communist, don't remember) in France that was selling MERCH on their website.
_"If you don't understand this, you never will."_
Ah yes, the scientific method and dialectical materialism at their finest: If you don't understand it before even starting, give up
They also love to say “You’re just not thinking dialectically,” which nearly always just means “No, see, you’re disagreeing with me. What you should do is agree with me.”
so what about,
If you don't believe it or don't get it, I don't have the time to try to convince you, sorry
@@vander9678 I mean, CZcams comment sections are rather poor forums for learning things that could easily be read elsewhere anyway, and nobody there is being compensated at all for their efforts. It's also of course the tactic of many "bad faith" actors to simply "just ask questions" as if they are entitled to endless responses, claiming victory when they tire out the person foolish enough to engage them. But generally speaking, we should be willing to have constructive conversations when our time allows, to be sure.
The issue is that, sometimes, relatively simple statements sound like radical claims which demand extraordinary evidence to uninitiated ears. It isn't really the requirement of any of our classmates to retype Marx, Lenin, Engels, Parenti, Sankara, or anyone else for a hostile audience of one, nor indeed should it be. At some point people do become that student who hasn't done the reading but who wants to keep raising their hand and taking up more and more class time, you know?
@@vander9678 That kind of statement instantly invites suspicion, because it's way more often said by people who want to get their message out without subjecting it to intellectual or moral scrutiny. Sure, it can be appropriate, I have (limited) sympathy for, say, a mathematician or a linguist not wanting to dumb down their concept to laypeople, but for politics? Economics? Fuck off with that shit, that subject isn't THAT complicated.
Evidence that the online left isn't a revolution, it's a hipster social club.
Anyone who does not have capital and must sell their labor-power to survive is the proletariat...it's not difficult
"CIA agents are the proletariat"
Labor-power*
@@chadmarx7718 edited my comment, thanks for the correction comrade
@@achmeineye all good!
@@jessee5559 I'd say under a Marxist view, CIA agents fall under "class traitors"? As in, people whose labour situation is technically proletarian, but who act as enforcers for the enemies of the proletariat.
Anyone who says "reactionary union of bourgeois service work" can be dismissed out of hand, they're just playing word jumble.
That was my immediate reaction. If you're not leisure class, you're not bourgeois.
@@alexhauser5043 Then what do you call the small scale capitalists? The plumber or hairdresser or farmer or house cleaner?
They own their own means of production (raw materials, tools, facilities, vehicles), and earn their living selling products/services to customers rather than receiving a wage/salary from an employer, so they are clearly not proletariat, but at the same time, they must spend as much or more time doing labour as the average wage earner in order to support themselves, so you clearly can't call them leisure class.
@@boosterh1113 They're what Marx called the 'petite bourgeoisie', as distinct from the true bourgeoisie.
But the claim that Starbucks workers are anything even remotely approaching bourgeoisie is risible.
Whoever made it is evidently associated with Kantbot, who is a fat slob who has never worked a day in his life. Birds of a feather.
@@boosterh1113Marx/this video defines that pretty well
Depends on what they mean, unions can totally be full of reactionary people, though not inherently, additionally one profession can lead to upgrading to bourgeoisie, I hear a lot of trades guys who were smart on saving just played into the system with investments and became minor level landlords, but ironically, these aren't the Starbucks workers, they're the opposite in fact, they're trades people who work hard with their hands. Which is funny, because it got so bad that even South Park noticed and rightly portrayed them as Musk tier billionaires. Which is funny, because it means that statement is true, but the opposite workers he didn't pin it on are the real problematic ones.
Assuming you think there's such a thing as ethical action under capitalism.
Which there isn't.
What many people miss is that for Marx productive and unproductive labour are completely amoral terms
Exactly this. Marxism is not a moral philosophy but a materialist one. This is precisely why Marx wrote Capital from the standpoint of capital itself.
Leftoids butthurt CIA agents aren't proles is too funny
you can tell by many marxists that they didnt bother to fill that gap and seek something beyond marx@@csm.andrew
True, though there is a difference between Capital and the communist manifesto in how he uses those terms.
Exactly
There's something very funny to me about someone accusing service workers of being "reactionary", for largely aesthetic/cultural reasons. Like, on a surface level, barista is a rather effete and fashionable job to have. He immediately went to the urban liberal steretype rather than say, cave guide or karate instructor.
Well, there actually is a credible threat of baristas organizing via the Starbucks union, so there is meaningful social capital to be earned by maligning that union.
Because he's a fascist, or more accurately a National Bolshevik, so for all intents and purposes a fascist with extra steps. It's very clear given how he talks elsewhere and with whom he associates. His idea of the "proletariat" is shaped by cultural factors because he's not really talking about socioeconomic class, he's talking about The Volk.
It's especially funny since being a barista actually involves, you know, _manual labor_ - like walking and staying on your feet all day, carrying things around, making new things out of raw materials and ingredients, oftentimes cleaning up...
@@kathorseesBaristas literally make coffee that others want to drink. And they have to do it fast if they want to keep their jobs. If that's not productive...
@@CrowsofAcheronThey're the average leftist who hasn't worked a day in their life, of course they don't know what work is 😅
To qualify a proletarian by their concrete labor is simply not Marxist. Instead of seeing a social class or a wage relationships, these folks are under the mirage that proletarians are a community of artisans. I had a friend who worked as a stripper but moved into being a construction worker. If their concrete labor has changed, but in both jobs their abstract labor is sold for profit, they are still fundamentally within the wage relationship and thus proletarian. As in the time of Marx, a worker can work at any job yet they are still a worker, and that is what matters in the science of class.
Absolutely.
I would agree with this. It's quite ironic to see people who talk about their disdain for the "culture war" base much of their class analysis on it, rather than analyzing the relations that cause someone to be defined as proletarian, petty bourgeois, etc.
dude, there were prostitutes in Marx's time and no he did not see them as proletarians. its not a value judgement or a badge of honor or something, its a discrete category of class
@@marcus_lyn - Why do you say that? AFAIK there is no judgement in Marx about prostitutes being or not proletarian. They obviously are however.
@@marcus_lyn Someone who works at a strip club isn't a prostitute. They have a wage labor relationship with their employer. Sex workers who aren't in that situation are lumpenproletariat, which Marx had a separate analysis for.
I think a good reason to combat this idea of 'starbucks workers aren't workers', even if it is being forwarded in a clearly rubbish manner, is that it is a really old idea that has proven very resilient. The very earliest moments of the union movement sought to exclude waiters (which is basically what Starbucks workers are), hotel porters, domestic servants and so on. Anybody who had to do emotional labour was often considered outside the movement, to significant damage.
Now, of course, most workers have to do some emotional labour so the prejudice is unmoored from its origin.
It's a stupid Fordist Era idea forged in the furnaces of the Stalinist USSR. It's Stakhanovism, the idolatry of the "iron man", a cult of a very specific (and idealized) type of proletarian.
I'm skeptical about that history. i found a short article that's relevant - Once Upon a Time, “Waitress” Was a Union Job. Could History Repeat Itself? - BY HALEY HAMILTON, SEPT 20, 2022
The Bartenders and Waiters Union in Chicago was formed in 1866. The Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union had 15 million members by the mid-1950s.
Any current bias against unionizing hotel and restaurant workers seems to be a reflection of changes in that industry that successfully marginalized unions, and the expectation that those jobs shouldn't be unionized is self-reinforcing.
@@davidm1926 I'm not saying it was universal but there was definitely resistance from manufacturing and artisan unions, at least on Europe, to unionising jobs that rested on emotional labour from the 19th century into the mid-20th.
@@davidm1926/
I think it's also helpful to note how these kinds of labor are associated with women in a lot of cases, which adds the unsavory flavor of sexism into the equation.
I think the idea is that in a communist society certain unneeded jobs would disappear, servants of the lord and the like. The issue is that 1: those workers are still yet workers and absolutely cannot be excluded from any wider movement and
2: when you take it to the extreme you start to consider any luxury, any labor not needed for basic human subsistence as frivolous bourgeois labor, and endorsing a world without even a nice hot drink in the morning feels like you're very much playing into the ascetic communist stereotype.
Leftist unwittingly admits communism leads to a decrease in quality of life
And we've even already had that. Check out the Khmer Rouge.
I also think it's a myopic view of human needs. Is entertainment really optional and disposable, or does it serve a valid human emotional need?
It also falls apart when you consider that these "luxuries" are also enjoyed by other working people without capital. The point is not the value of these things to the working class, but to signal to the far-right that superficial bourgeois signifiers of frivolity are not welcome in *their* "communism," which isn't really communism at all.
It makes no sense since the first things juman developed were music dance and storytelling much earlier than concrete and iron tools. So actually these “frivolous activities” are very important to us as humans
Something tells me that original poster just wants to justify how rude and disrespectful they have been and intend to continue being toward workers they actually have to interact with from time to time in the capacity of a customer, unlike the glorious amazon fulfillment center proletariat whom they only engage with abstractly (as a customer) lol
Honestly, had the same thought.
The post reeks of rightous entitlement.
Typical American consumer, they seek to be pandered too by those they despise.@@DocKrazy
Bourgeois service work? Is that supposed to be a funny oxymoron?
No some people actually believe this lol.
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra Those people have never worked for minimum wage.
No, it's a fascist dog whistle.
You know how white supremacists say black people are the real racists and they hold the real power?
Or that stupid supposed quote about "look at who you can't criticize to see who has the power"
It's that. They're claiming reverse oppression by lgbtq people, or women, or leftists, etc.
And white men who install plumbing are the real oppressed minority
I remember this thread and how hilarious I found it because when it was posted I was literally in the underground agitation phase of unionizing a coffee chain. We won, btw. Contract will be ratified soon.
congratulations!
Yo! That's awesome! Congrats!
congrats!
coffee ground agitation, i get it
I just think a lot of this is driven by people personally disliking service workers, which is pretty amusing honestly. As if said "unproductive occupations" are created and sculpted explicitly by the people employed by a coercive economic system rather than the other way around.
A lot of self identified radicals basically identify as consumers first and workers second (if at all)
If I could work in a factory or even a farm, I'd have no problem with it. But because the city I live in is virtually un-walkable and all of the jobs are literally several cities away and the "productive occupations" don't really bother picking up inexperienced people, I pretty much have to be a service worker of some kind.
@@hyperion3145 Marx himself straight up says that productive Vs unproductive jobs isn't necessarily some judgement on worth and more relevant to the nature of the labour in relation to how it generates wealth and value. "Jobs" (which itself is a semi modern concept that's been influenced heavily by capitalism) that are unproductive have many reasons for existing, experience all the same labor pressures and economic conditions that other equivalent "productive" jobs might, so it's a pointless divide as far as support and political rights are concerned.
Besides any attempt to compare a financial trader to a barista is probably not a serious one. And even in the case of that - the job exists because of the current economic system, and perhaps some baristas do too, but there are direct equivalent roles in "productive" jobs that would barely change the labour being done, whereas many financial sector jobs just cease to even be sensical with only a moderately different economic system. Not even abolishing capitalism or whatever.
actually starbucks workers are mostly women and being a woman is bourgeousie. hope this helps
Im kidding, this is a good video. I don't know where you're from and maybe it's like this a lot of places but I think it's interesting that in the USA 'working class' is a cultural identity; some dude who owns a quarter million dollar truck, owns an hvac company, etc is working class cuz he's a republican, but a starbucks worker who lives on minimum wage isnt because they're supposedly part of some liberal elite or whatever.
> being a woman is bourgeousie
Hi Harry Du Bois, didn't expect to see you here. :P
Pretty weird; aint it?
This is probably the best explanation here, so much of online ideology is based around identity rather than a rational take of the conditions.
No that is pretty much what their thought process boils down to.
Tbh chattel slavery is nothing in comparison with girlbossing.
Even the idea that society doesn't need Starbucks falls apart because though there's no strictly utilitarian purpose a cafe can serve that a cafeteria cannot, society still needs recreational and social facilities. "What society needs" cannot be described exhaustivly, but this need in particular is something which is not liable to change with circumstances.
While there is perhaps something bourgeois about the kind of lifestyle associated with these facilities as opposed to the rugged and pragmatic worker in manual labor, this has no bearing on private property, which is the real core of what socialism is about.
Also the idea that a "bourgeois" lifestyle or cultural preferences take someone out of the working class is very detrimental to class solidarity in advanced economies with a large service sector. The bourgeoisie is the enemy, defined by their ownership and control over the means of production. They're millionaires and billionaires, not struggling artists and students saddled with debt.
If I don't get my caramel machiatto, there's gonna be hell to pay!😡
The deepest irony is that so much of the socialist movement of the 19th century was developed in Coffee houses. Marx, Engels, and all manner of other socialist and non socialist scholars and intellectuals used coffee houses as a fourm of ideas.
@@ArcAngle1117Yes, third places can have a great impact on society.
I like to combat this mentality with a simple question: what would good life in a good society look like? Is it "everyone works either at the steel mill or Amazon, and there's no cafes and DEFINITELY no Netflix"? Sounds kinda dystopian to me. How about "no matter where you work - at Amazon, at a cafe or at Netflix, you can make a decent living without exploiting others or being exploited" instead?
also the idea that starbucks baristas specifically are just “service workers” is wrong. on a base level, someone taking pieces of wood and refining them into a table for a customer in a factory is the same as someone taking coffee beans and milk etc and refining them into drinks for a customer in a starbucks
That's what makes the initial tweet such an obvious troll to me. Like there very clearly is a process of production happening there! You can order your coffee and watch it in real time behind the counter!
true, they don't just "serve", they process raw materials into finished products. Of course all of this is completely beside the point: if you can't see that a successful Starbucks union helps unions in general, you are an idiot.
The reason I quit working at Starbucks was that it was, out of several jobs I have had over my life currently, the most physically demanding and exhausting work. I would work a 4 hour shift and pass out on my couch for 2 hours, with my knees shot, clothes wet from all the dishwashing, and reeking of coffee and stale milk. I once got home and got ready to take a nap and I woke up 5 hours later with one sock half off because I had literally passed out mid-undressing. It was destroying my knees to the point that I had to go to physical therapy because I would come home and just wouldn’t be able to function for the rest of the day. And, yes, my experiences might be more dramatic than others, but baristas are so far from simply “service” workers.
Now I have a union job where I sometimes end up working 16-hour days, and it’s still not as exhausting or physically damaging as Starbucks was.
I found the capitalist and Marxist systems unhelpful when trying to think through a social/material problem like housing stock - with competing need for productive farming land. In many ways it is almost like the contemporary human beings are insane. For example - large amounts of fuel and time are spent on mowing lawns (an altered vestigial behavior derived from a once used hospitality grazing area for transport animals...). If we are at all concerned with 'carbon emissions' we might need to take on a more ecological view of 'production'. While this view might not be good for the careers of lawn care workers, or barista, or pilots, it might be good to have a habitable world. Our use of carbon on frivolities should shock us. Imagine how much more real it would be if we needed to load coal into our TVs. Sry
my understanding of starbucks is that almost everything has been automated, that all the "barista" (not actually a barista) is doing is just turning on a machine, taking orders and serving people their orders. i mean this is literally something that either an actual barista could do, or that could be totally automated. we are paying for the service of being served by a human being, its part of the "experience" that starbucks is selling. but its not a real one. so a) the people doing it are miserable and b) the people being served treat the workers like shit because they can recognize the experience is fake. its the definition of a "bullsht job".
Me: "Jonas don't do it this is obviously bait."
Jonas: "Now, some of you might say this take is so bad it doesn't merit a video response."
Honestly, with the guy who posted it, yes, it's bait, but he's also completely deranged, so there's a rich layer of ugly subtext worth exposing.
yeah, it was obvious bait, but it was also useful as a basis for a learning opportunity. the bait can also work as clickbait for this video 😉
well regardless of whether it's bait, the person who posted the tweet deserves what's coming to them
Given how prevalent the idea is, I definitely think it’s important to discuss. The amount of folks who came out of the woodwork to proclaim that owner-operator truckers and small-scale, landowning farmers are the proper representatives of the proletarian movement during the Convoy nonsense in Canada was way too high. The proletarian movement is doomed is people start letting lower middle-class shitheads be it’s proper representatives.
I'm really loving this video! I think you should rename it to "Who Is A Worker?" It's very useful to me as a musician because sometimes it's hard to explain to other leftists that I actually am a worker when I perform my music at venues. The missing element that you've pointed out is that a music venue takes the artistic product which I've created for its own use value and turns it into the commodity of a "show" and the related ticket, drink, and food sales. 99% of my work is that, and of course, you would expect the management to use this argument that I am "doing it for fun" in order to negotiate a lower rate, but it's so disappointing when you see that from other workers.
Excellent video. Those who seek to divide the working class are always around, are always wrong, and are always worth rebutting. It's maddening how many people think of class in cultural terms.
its a pity that we are not in 19 century and there is no need to divide anything, our soicietes evoled way past marxs analysis. you need new analysis, not moaning about division of "working class"
Me in a too-long line at Whataburger: the food workers are not proletarian because they conspire against me to make me wait forever
"Oh (insert whichever profession you personally don't like) is an 'unprotected not real worker(TM)' doing things society doesn't need. Finds out later being a "productive worker" just means being successfully exploited by your boss...
Something worth considering is the gendered undertones present when discussing what constitutes "real" labor. The types of labor deemed "productive," as described by Logo Daedalus, all involve supplying raw materials, presumably applying heavy physical work typically associated with strong, muscular men. On the other hand, when you think of a writer, a barista, or a librarian, the first image that likely comes to mind is not of someone who is not exceedingly masculine. It appears that the invented distinction between "productive" and "unproductive" labor is essentially a division between "hard" masculine labor and "soft," effeminate labor where only the former deserves sympathy.
Maybe that's true for some of the dumber contrarian types out there (and they sure are out there on Twitter, even pre-Musk), but I'll give the OP the benefit of the doubt and say that they're generally aware of female participation in industrial labor, and that it's more a question of industrial labor vs. the service economy, which is a question that deserves at least some consideration and not to simply be brushed off with a lazy first-year humanities student critique like this. I don't know who Logo Daedalus is, so maybe he is an intellectual lightweight who thinks this way, but the distinction has been acknowledged before by academics. If you were talking about how social scientists rarely factor domestic labor into these things, this kind of critique might be worth bringing up, but that's an entirely different discussion.
Of course, if you want to get down to it, the Bangladeshi and Filipina women who work under incredibly poor conditions to produce cheap goods fall into the latter category (in the sense of being a very 'feminized' labor force; managers of Mexican maquiladoras, for example, have been quoted as stating that garment manufacturing is an ideal job for women because of their smaller hands, and even manufacturers who stayed in the US gravitated towards hiring women who had recently immigrated from southeast Asia for more 'delicate' work, based on similar stereotypical assumptions), but they are far more proletarian than either group of first world labor aristocrats.
@@yep9462I think we should definitely discuss that more in-depth (regarding the industrial labor Vs. Service-Economy problem).
Should the Service Economy be seen as entirely non-proletarian, or should it simply be seen as less proletarian?
@@yep9462 I really don't see the point of defining anyone as "more or less proletarian." Obviously the people working in sweatshops have much worse conditions than most workers in the first world, but when we start to define who is "the most proletarian," all we do is create a pissing contest that divides the proletariat. There's a reason why the concept of the "middle class" exists, and it's to create a divide between the poor proletariat and the well-paid proletariat and prevent class solidarity.
@@Sina-dv1eg You speak about this as if I am creating some artificial division rather than analyzing global inequality as it exists. Workers in the global North benefit from the continued economic exploitation of their counterparts in the global South. There is an inherent contradiction there, and it can be seen in the mixed-to-negative results of attempts at collaboration between US unions and those in the third world during the past 20-30 years. So much of US 'leftism' is just "give us more concessions, we want to go back to the postwar consensus, who cares about everyone else" for a reason ffs
@@yep9462Do you think improving working conditions in the global north would _necessarily_ harm workers in the global south? Because if not there's no contradiction, just miscommunications. And if you do think that workers rights are a zero sum game, how? How are the actions of a starbucks barista union negatively affecting workers on coffee plantations? The only mechanism I can see for that is deliberate vindictiveness by capitalists themselves, and blaming the union for _that_ is like blaming a wife for talking back to her husband when said husband goes off to take out his anger on their child.
I guess Game Designers shouldn't be unionised since their labour is "unproductive" ...smh
Doctors and teachers too apparently. Since the only thing society needs is to "potash, fertilizer, grains and minerals"
@@Sina-dv1egYes 😎
They should unionize. That doesn't mean that their union will have much revolutionary potential though.
their labour is anti productive. video games are predatory wastes of time
@@Firmus777if the revolution is more important than actually helping people, than the revolution shouldn't happen in the first place
Takes like this remind me that Marx would have been a podcaster and have been an incredible poster, which would have been a massive tragedy. It was so important he was born in the time he was or else all the genius would have gone to the attention of dullards with these kinds of takes.
Mark was one of the founders of sociology, so it's hard to know what any of this would look like now with a different Marx-less sociology.
Marx is a fucking rabbi lmfao
This feels perfectly timed insofar as the other day a bandcamp manager railed against the union, citing pretty much this same opening argument: the amazon union is fine, the bandcamp one isn't. If managers are agreeing with your position on unionisation, maybe it's a poor position.
That original tweet thread is the third post by them I’ve seen. And all I can think is “How can you be trying so hard to sound smart and revolutionary while coming off as so ignorant and reactionary?”
Stalinists...
I don't remember the dweeb in question (and hell, the dweeb in question pays $8-11/mo for Twitter), but I do remember a lot of the people saying shit like that are those so-called PatSocs that are reactionary
@@LuisAldamiz Larping Stalinists, to be correct.
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra - Actual ones often. I've sadly wasted enough time with some of those, for me they are a total destructive burden to the cause of communism and tend to slide way too easily into reactionarism.
@@LuisAldamiz Marxist-Leninists don't actually think this way lol, only moronic patsocs and 14 year old tank drivers. 😂
Incredible video, as always. This is the kind of synthesis that reminds us how crucial Marx's works are to understand our time. For instance, with the rise of Uber and similar companies, it appears that a deep change occured in the nature of work under capitalism; however, a Uber driver is generating surplus value to the company, regardless of the specific (and spurious) conditions of that work. The only change we have here is one of political and juridical nature: instead of working for a fixed wage, with minimal social security and certainty, the proletarian now is also a "self entrepreneur", being responsible for the integrity of the means used in such work (in this case, their own car) and, in fact, for everything that could occur during a working day (accidents, health problems, etc.). It's a relation that frees the company owner of such responsabilities, maximizing their profit. It's a new form of overexploitation, made possible by the general weakening of unions and proletariat movements in the last 4 decades or so.
The self entrepeneur thing is an especially important and fundamental part of neoliberal thinking. I recommend Dardot and Laval's book about neoliberalism for more on this.
All you did was describe contract work. It is not a new capitilism, it has always existed since time
Great fundamentals. Marx was careful to remain agnostic in his terminologies, or exhaustive in his specifics, because materialist analysis lives and dies by it. I loathe when people take vulgarized Marxist concepts and use them as cudgels for the clout pinata. I loved your breakdown of various industries and their relationships to society, especially financiers and bankers. I've had successes with people mired in liberal thinking traps by highlighting just how many industries and jobs exist only for the protection, accounting, and circulation of capital. I've always favored the approach of trying to make someone understand that we've moved into post-scarcity levels of production, and that any lack foisted onto society is solely engineered misery by capital forces to maintain the status quo, highlighting how many people exist only to ferry capital around or devise exotic new schemes for it is a nice wedge for that.
I've spent my last few months in college tutoring peers who were less comfortable with the subjects we were learning. They weren't stupid, they just needed to hear the explanations in a way that resonated with them. It was lovely. We learned a lot from each other and became good friends.
Then I log online, see this, and feel guilty for studying IT because the internet was clearly a huge mistake.
Those tweets at the start remind me why I deleted Twitter.
Classic format coming in clutch again:
People on Twitter: Working at Starbucks makes you bourgeois!!!!!
People in real life: Hey bud, how's it going?
As you allude to at the end with the note of how many of these "service workers aren't proletarian" guys are, put bluntly, crypto-fascists, the guy who produced the initial tweets included, it's pretty clear to me that the heart of this rhetoric is a mask for denigrating not only traditional service labour, but labour which may be seen as "immoral" such as sex work, or "women's work" such as most reproductive labour (nursing, childcare, etc.), without framing the objection in terms of moral disgust or base sexism. Granted, Marx himself could be similarly dismissive of certain social classes and professions, his comments on the "lumpenproletariat" and dismissal of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry springing to mind, but in the same way that the racist Orientalism of the "Asiatic mode of production" hasn't carried forward with any contemporary Marxist theorist worth taking seriously, I think it reasonable to leave such attitudes in the past where they belong as well.
It is also worth noting, perhaps, that "unproductive" labour in the Marxist sense illustrated here is not inherently a value judgement, although the terminology might imply as much, but rather such labour as creates immediate use-value simply implies a different relation to capitalism and labour. At the beginning of The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels note that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat are the focus of their analysis, but not the sole economic classes extant in the economic system of their time; independent artisans own their own means of production, for example, but do not wield the economic power over others that the bourgeois or aristocratic strata do. There is more to be said about the nuances of the petit bourgeoisie as well, although that's a little less cut and dry, but it's telling that these guys have to frame people whose labour is exploited by capital as "unproductive" while pushing the idea that those who own businesses which employ workers somehow *aren't* petit bourgeois to square the circle of their very silly worldview.
And mind you, I say all this as an anarchist with some fundamental criticisms of Marxist political economy as an enterprise. But by the very logic of that enterprise, which has its merits as an analysis of capitalism specifically, what these people are arguing is fundamentally not Marxist, it's vaguely Sorelian, which given their obvious political leanings fits like a glove.
not liking sex work and abortion is fascist.... lol
True.
sex work is not work its slavery
@@3breze757 If you were (or are) a sex worker I would respect your opinion, regardless of its objective untruth.
@@3breze757 If so, then isn't arresting people for sex work inherently immoral? You are, by that logic, imprisoning people with no choice in their fate.
Ah yes, Amazon, my favourite supplier of potash, fertilizer, grain and minerals 😂
In an inherently flexible world, any luxury today could be a necessity tomorrow and vice versa
"[people selling their time and energy in the form of labor to ultimately survive] don't need a union"
"society treats these workers worse because they are needed more" is such a bizarre logical leap. also, as an industrial worker, society does treat me way better than a mcdonald's employee while 'my' product also could be considered "more needed"
This is a huge problem on leftist Twitter. Marx was around during a specific time period. He wasn’t aware of today’s specific issues. His work is supposed to inspire people to liberate themselves and others, it’s not a Bible to exclude other workers. Capitalism changes over time, that’s why his work needs to be built upon by current workers. There’s been a rise in “independent contractors” Not “employees or workers” by law. Many jobs have moved overseas without the protections of labor laws, as well as the exploitation of undocumented immigrants & prison labor. People are being pushed into the informal economy. Some leftists wouldn’t consider most workers to be workers, which makes no sense.
@nomickike2165 You mean a social science. Not like the laws of physics. If the only people with “revolutionary potential” are some of the most privileged and richest workers in our society, what’s the “Revolution”? This demographic is not going to liberate all of society. At most, they might be able to secure better pay and benefits for themselves. But it does nothing for undocumented immigrants, independent contractors, prison labor, etc. Capitalism overtime seeks to eliminate the need & recognization of workers & replace them with automation/machines, slavery or informal/temp labor. If anything, these labor forces are more profitable and will grow in numbers over time. There’s also a lot of historical evidence showing that these groups have been responsible for drastic changes in our society, have been part of labor movements, and protests. Ignoring historical and present-day reality is bad social science. And I don’t think that Marx was telling us to do that.
@nomickike2165 Marx’s definition of proletarian wasn’t “worker with revolutionary potential”. He wasn’t as forthright in his class definitions as he should have been, but it’s fairly clear that revolutionary potential is downstream of the fact of the proletariat’s conditions in his day.
@nomickike2165 I agree and I think Marx's point still stands true on the fact that those enslaved by capital are infinitely more revolutionary than people on fiver or independent contractors
Also baristas do produce things. They make coffee. They don’t farm the coffee beans or do the work of turning it into brew able coffee. However they do have both technical knowledge and do labour to produce high quality (or at least a certain level of quality) coffee.
The claim is both factually wrong and ignores basic elements of socialist analysis
That Logo_Daedalus post would have been really good if it were meant as engagement bait but the guy literally believes that garbage.
This is a great reminder that, as much as Marxism is associated with 'material conditions' and a sort of hardcore emphasis on the physical/historical, capital itself and its behavior is a social phenomenon as highlighted here. Quality work as always!
the instant you read that tweet the first thing i thought was "tell me you haven't read Das Kapital without telling you haven't read Das Kapital
Hell, nobody has read Das Kapital, but most people don't try to re-structure Marxism around their personal distaste for baristas.
I'm a total newbie to any of this kind of left philosophy/theory, so I really appreciated this video. Thank you.
I'll take the full-blown crank route and just believe that all these dumb Twitter takes are psy-ops, lol.
Probably, as a right winger I can tell you that's 100% true for right wingers on X (formerly twitter).
Logo Daedalus definitely is
@@cloudycolacorp You misunderstand lol, I'm one of the right wingers who says "the quite" part out loud. The ones that do so on twitter only do it temporarily and then rope everyone back into regular conservatism later on. A perfect example is Tucker, he'll talk about the "great replacement" but make it about how the immigrants are voting democrat instead of republican to minimize the racial aspect and then when it's no longer a hot topic, goes back to ufos or whatever dumb shit he talks about.
I'm not convinced that basically all "left-wing" spaces on the internet aren't almost entirely psy-ops. I've been banned from 3 different (major) "socialist" or "marxist" subreddits for saying that Putin is right-wing and praising him has no place in a left-wing space. Maybe that makes me paranoid, but I've yet to find one genuinely left-wing space on the internet that isn't full of right-wingers cosplaying as socialists.
to treat only the basic essentials as necessary is to approach human life from the perspective of people who think that homeless people or prison inmates shouldn't have any luxuries or forms of entertainment whatsoever. It's fundamentally in favor of human suffering. We literally need joy to survive
The idea of someone entering the bourgeoisie by leaving their job at an Amazon fulfillment center to become a Starbuck's barista, their material conditions and relation to capital remaining the same, is hilarious.
I think it'd be interesting to discuss how on Fiverr, or Uber, or even Amazon, how the contractors on there are producing profit for the owners of those platforms. So while Amazon may hire individual drivers as contractors (they're their own business oftentimes), they are effectively employees. There's kind of a veil there between the expenditure and the investment. And I wonder how far you could extend this veil, like are all unproductive actually just be working for a larger system? If we were a monarchy wouldn't the bourgeois be working for the king? I dunno, I'm just kind of wondering how that works in our modern society
I think it will always be more benificial to hire people for their labor power than for a distinct output. because then when productivity goes up, the employer keeps he difference, not the worker.
the phenomenon of misclassified "contractors" doesn't necessarily change the underlying social relations. Though in some cases there is probably a meaningful difference...
Indeed, "Uberization", the capitalist masking and manipluating of very real exploitation under "free contract" nonsense reform.
When you sign on platforms like fiverr, they explicitly tell you the surplus labor they are taking from you. They just call it "service fee". It's around a ⅕th or ⅙th of your revenue usually on these "freelancer" platforms. The labor contract is vastly different, the labor exploitation is the same
@@perfectlyfine1675 It's not the same, because on a platform like that an increase in your productivity will create a proportional increase in revenue for both you and the platform. Whereas in a wage-based job all excess productivity benefits only the company. I think it makes sense to distinguish this as a category of its own.
I was going to mention this as well. In the case of Fiverr, Patreon, etc, there is always a profit motive, but only through a tax or rent over the gains of the productive element of the relationship. I would love to hear a vide about this , maybe in relation to Varoufakis' Technofeudalism
Society is when no one enjoys anything.
Edit: Source: I am a femboy who just picks up old people and takes them to the hospital(paramedic), therefore not a worker, thats why I cant have a union.
I like paramedics, they are very essential workers.
The other day my friend and I were talking about a fictional character and my frustration that he is only described as "working class". Basically I was saying this description tells me almost nothing about a character because almost everyone is working class. I'm working class. You're working class. Most people on the planet are working class.
He said "yeah, but I'm more service industry working class and you do actual labor" (he's mostly worked in foodservice and I've been a tradesman most of my life)
This made me really sad, and I wasn't really sure how to respond. I don't think making burgers for people to eat is easy or nonessential.
Even the people who run a McDonalds FEED people. There's no reason my work building structures for people to live and work in should be placed above the work of feeding people.
We all deserve better. We all deserve union protection. All workers are necessary.
thank you very much for this video, I came across the thread and did not see anyone refuting it till this video popped up, this really elucidated the definition of "proletariat"! very useful
My fellow Good sir and scholar, i am found to be in complete and utter agreement
@@ThinkImBasedGod 🚆 ✈🛴🕌
It's simple. There's more to life than just surviving. We do *need* frivolous services like art, good food, music, and entertainment. Those things give life meaning. Honestly, the impulse to deride anything that doesn't directly perpetuate living in itself such as Healthcare, food production, shelter, etc is always posited to look toward the poor and marginalized, but I do wonder if those ppl have actually spoken to anyone that's poor or was raised poor and gathered their thoughts on the subject (im certain they themselves were not).
@@nomickike2165 I never suggested that ppl are calling to ban art, but it's treated as a subpar endeavor.
@@nomickike2165 well, I think American media is very distinct based on numerous factors not simply relegated to capitalism itself. So any other system we design will hopefully not look like *this*.
@@nomickike2165Did you even watch the video lil bro?
Exactly. People always seem to have a weird notion that we shouldnt have anything like video games, music, entertainment because it isnt directly related to our survival.
Amazon workers are actually more service workers than Starbucks from the standpoint of tertiary vs secondary economy. They aren't as visibly consumer-facing, but Baristas DO in fact produce a physical product from raw materials and industrial intermediates while also doing other tasks, such as taking orders from customers, serving the customers those orders, maintaining the means of production themselves, recording transactions, etc. A warehouse worker, meanwhile, is wholly a service worker. They do not produce any sort of physical goods. It matters not that they are blue collar and a barista white collar. The Barista is actually a 2.5-ary worker while a warehouse worker is entirely 3-ary.
And regardless, all are proletarians.
In what world is being a barista a white collar job?
@@DuncanL7979White/Blue collar is... such a weird thing to be honest. What the fuck kind of collar is a chemist spending 10-12 hours a day in a laboratory exposed to toxic chemicals and potentially carcinogenic radiation working on developing new catalysts, new synthesis processes, scaling up industrial production or doing quality control tests.
Whether it's a technician or a full scientist.
This is a banging channel. Super clear, articulate, and well-sourced; keep up the good work!
Oh xuitter, the tribunal of nanocauses... The website of more than mental health... Thank you for explaining the obvious, Jonas. You are way more kinder than I could ever be.
"Oh xuitter, the tribunal of nanocauses"
I have a sneaking suspicion that know exactly from who you borrow that phrase.
tribunal of nanocauses is one of the best descriptions I've ever seen
@@CEOofGameDev it's from @assimdisseojoao 🤣
@@JuuuDantas droga, eu tava pensando no lulu
Não acredito.
this idea of the 'ideal' worker looks suspiciously fashie to my eyes.
It's not about ideals at all. It's about an objective difference between productive and unproductive workers. If you think this is fascist the problem is with you
Average 🤡 Haz fan@@brharley0546
@@brharley0546 when we get into the idea that some workers are more deserving of rights, it most certainly does.
@@renaigh what rights are you talking about
@@brharley0546 If your proletarian status can be revoked because the capitalists have today decided to use your labour-power to brew coffee rather than assemble cars, the term seems useless as a class description. An assembly line worker and a barista are in the same situation, economically. They're in an employment contract with a capitalist where they sell their labour for a wage.
This was a very good breakdown of an argument I've come across. I loved the analogy with the transport industry as service work in relation to its Value and labor value, I haven't seen that referenced directly before. I've never fully understood labor analysis with the transport industries so seeing the direct analysis in Kapital is eye opening. It's something new that I learned, even when I already agreed with your general argument and analysis the entire time.
Really good video and explaination, Jonas. As always, a pleasure to hear from you. Hope to hear more from you soon!
What really gets me is what is the goal of this talking point? The implication seems to be that companies like Starbucks and Netflix have bad vibes, therefore the capitalists who own those companies should get to abuse their workers in order to punish them for working there.
The reason for the growth of the tertiary economy is the mismatch in supply of products and the lack of improvement in productivity of each service worker. The reason for the supply of products increasing is because industrialization greatly improves the productivity of a given factory worker, miner, or farmer.
Thus, primary and secondary economy loses jobs over time while tertiary economy gains them.
Yesss, very very good walkthrough of the concepts of productive and unproductive labour. Glad you talk about the contents of the second volume of Capital also - that's where the complexity really arises ! :)
This vid tighten's up a number of things for me.
Thanks!
There's a "philosophy" book, that does class distinction by that degree. It's called The Leisure Class. It lead to the Khmer Rouge.
Wut. You have to be kidding.
Veblen would NEVER have classified 'baristas' as part of the leisure class. He would have placed them in the class of menial workers whose sole function is to serve the leisure class and the closely allied professional class.
Pol Pot was educated in France. As far as I know, he never claimed Veblen as an influence.
I looked for this comment. I was thinking "Khmer Rouge" immediately when i read the post!
The tweet's idea of labor is more in line with the classical political economists such as Adam Smith and François Quesnay. They demarcated work into such categories - productive and unproductive, on grounds similar to what that tweet mentions. It should be noted that Das Kapital is a critique of (classical) political economy.
This explained the concept really well thank you
"this union serves coffee" "this union ships boxes" "these unions could never advocate for the same kind of worker rights" lel
Great video, I really liked the clear and pedagogical way in which the concepts were worked on. But it brought me a broader question, how would state workers, public servants, be classified? I think about my own position as a teacher in the public school system. The focus would not be on generating profit for the State, or capitalists. Despite understanding that for Marx the State would be a representative of bourgeois interests.
I guess you would be a proletarian, but not a productive worker, because you don't directly create surplus value for a capitalist's profit. Although, as you kinda hint towards, if we accept the cynical view that even public schools exist just to train future productive workers, lines get blurry.
You are a piece of infrastructure, if you will forgive the dehumanizing phrasing. Your function is to provide education, which makes workers within the economy more productive and efficient. You are a foundation upon which other economic activity is built.
Which I guess benefits the State? But I'm not sure I agree with the idea that the State (or government in general) is necessarily bad. Or, perhaps I don't understand the definition being used. It feels like the framing here is that "anything which supports the collective economy is supporting capitalism", which I don't hold with at all. Even under socialism or communism, education would be necessary and valuable.
I'm pretty sure you're a proletarian in any case, since you don't own your means of production, you are selling your labour to survive, and you are indirectly supporting capitalism. And if you and your colleagues stopped working, the economy would be worse off for your absence. The loss might not be felt immediately, but a shortage of educated workers would really sting in the long-term.
According to Marx school teachers, doctors, lawyers, managers and others who specialize in something to serve the public are not proletarian because they are exchanging patients/clients revenue for their services rather than being under the thumb of capital, though one could argue that this is starting to change with the financialization of upper-middle-class specialist work.
man I love criticofpolecon his stuff being used warms my heart
Fascinating video, thankyou! I'd wondered for a while what my work would be considered as so this has given me a lot of food for thought. I really need to find a copy of Das Kapital already XD
Workers are Workers regardless of who buys their labour.
Are prostitutes workers then?
@@brharley0546 Asking for yourself harley?
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra i ask to understand. It seems like you believe everyone who works for a wage are productive workers, regardless of the value they produce
@@brharley0546not all workers are productive workers but what a worker does doesn't determine whether you're a proletarian or not.
@@brharley0546whether or not a worker produces value isn't intrinsically politically important. It's human society that needs to stop producing value
Jonas's calm and deliberate voice gives way too much dignity to Logo_Deadalus' horrible tweet thread lol
As a Libertarian, I'm glad I listened to this. Very informative
Great video, really getting to the heart of the matter. Thanks
I feel like modern labor needs a broader definition of productive labor. Capitalists extract value through new methods, like patreon/youtube, and it seems like a definition that excludes financial workers is probably ignoring how many of them relate to their employer.
I mean CZcamsrs are essentially commission workers. Is that so different from a wage when the contract is entered into from the platform on the guarantee of extracted surplus value in the form of their share of the revenue?
@@NoJusticeMTG They're not commission workers, it's a publisher relationship. CZcams "publishes" creators by paying for server costs, promoting them through the algorithm, connecting them to ad providers, etc. and then take a cut in return
That doesn't seem like a different definition than marxs
The finance example seems particularly strange to me. Most finance workers would be employed in finance related firms. In most of these firms they would seem to operate exactly the same as any other waged labor. How does something like a financial advisor meaningfully differ from a starbucks worker or a factory worker? They sell their labor to owners of capital, who direct it towards some end and capture the surplus value produced in the course of their acitivities.
The point of dialectics is to look at exactly that, how they relate to their employer.
It's the social relation that matters.
Anyone who argues that service workers aren't workers (to what ends?), has never done any organizing or provided anything of value to working class struggle. Would they argue that slaves who did domestic work, weren't really slaves, while the slaves working in fields and mines were the "real" slaves?
Hey I loved this video! Wanted to add, something missing from this discussion is Imperialism and the impact of the Labor Aristocracy in imperial core countries. Although many US workers could be seen as "proletariat" in the abstract, on a global scale some benefit significantly from exploitation of third world workers and this has deeply influenced reactionary and economistic trade union organizing in the core for the past century+. So wether or not all the workers discussed in this video are "proletariat" in the sense that they are a revolutionary base in society is another question entirely which requires studying imperialism within the core countries
According to Marx in his time revolution could ONLY happen in the imperial core due to it having the reasources and material conditions to do so. Since places outside of Imperial core were subject to non-capitalist social means he believed that the specific conditions for the revolution could only happen there.
One example explifying this was French efforts to grow cotton in West Africa. It was explicitly an effort in futility that the state made colonized peoples participate in; forcing them into unproductive labour for the state's own good instead of for profit. Thus any social movement in French West Africa would not have the correct animus to forment the revolution as Marx envisioned.
However material conditions have changed and today many of the former places outside of the metropoles might be ripe for such a revolution. But capitalism is still new in many of these places and Marx thought that all groups of people must have their capitalist phase to develop wealth and create the material conditions for socialist revolution.
Yeah this is interesting and all but I feel like it very much ignores the correlation between neoliberal austerity, industrial labor offshoring, and the casualization of labor/contract work. All things that have caused the expansion of service labor at the expense of decent wages and steady work. These jobs are, in a word, superfluous, and only exist to give us the wages we need to live while not necessarily creating the subsistence necessary for us to live. The point a lot of these magacoms are making is that the global south produces the important shit we use to live while we get stuck working retail despite the low wage high turnover that runs rampant in these dead end positions with non existent career programs.
Ultimately this begs the question concerning whether any of these workers are the ones actually producing surplus-value any longer - when compared to their off-shore counterparts - or whether they are superfluous labor in the contemporary economy, a question which value-theorists are still split on and is fueling the “neo-feudalist” debates. Of course, this is a problem that extends way further than Amazon vs Starbucks.
To that point; so what? Marx didn't believe that people who worked in hotels or restaurants or whatever weren't proletarian even in an age where most people worked in factories or as farm laborers so what's the point of making this arbitrary distinction? These "magacoms" seem incapable of understanding that we now live in a system in which the tentacles of capital have encroached on every industry and that all who are caught within it should be welcomed to struggle against it. What difference is there between the warehouse worker and the line cook that makes the latter "superfluous?" Both work dehumanizing hours under the domination of an industry that needs their labor and robs them of their livelihoods by not giving them what they make, they both have a common enemy in the bosses.
Anyone who makes productive workers _feel good_ about what they are or what they do under capitalism is immediately suspect from a perspective of class struggle.
exactly
This is anti-work nonsense. Marxism is a workers' philosophy.
That's not what he's trying to do at all, though
fr how dare ppl not be in constant marxist psychosis
Thinking that reproductive labour, that is labour that reproduces the worker, is not able to be proletariat is a big theoretical error. It's usually made in the defense of patriarchal divisions of domestic labour
You can't really even say that service workers do not produce intangible stuff. A barista produces coffee. You still need someone to turn coffee beans into actual drinkable coffee. That's the good that the barista produces.
Using that context, we can say that the shelf stocker is producing a good, the good being a stocked shelf. You need someone to turn a bunch of boxed products into shelved products and that's what a supermarket stocker does.
You can say that for a cook, a dentist (tooth fillings and polished teeth are tangible products) and so on and so fro.
Even an office worker who created a useful spreadsheet that can process purchase orders quickly has produced a product; the spreadsheet.
Services are "goods."
Good shit. Pls keep making these, they matter.
I order things on Amazon very occasionally. I know some people use amazon for groceries, but I mostly still shop at grocery stores, and I suspect this is true of most people. On the other hand, despite not really being able to afford it, I get Starbucks at least weekly, and I'm caffeine dependent so I *need* Starbucks workers a lot more than I need amazon workers, strictly speaking. My workplace relies on Amazon a bit more than I do personally, but Amazon in its current form (ie walmart with delivery) is a recent enough development that when I graduated high school in 2015, almost no one in my circles regularly ordered stuff from Amazon. But almost everyone got a latte every once in a while. And let's not forget that Starbucks, if I'm not mistaken, is literally older than Amazon. So Starbucks is at least as essential as Amazon, though of course society predates both of these institutions, and plenty of adults remember living without either of them.
ALSO, Starbucks workers do produce things? They take raw materials (beans, water, milk) and turn them into various mixed drinks. You may not have to produce physical objects to be productive, but Starbucks workers DO produce physical objects. A latte is a thing. It's not, like, an intangible idea. Starbucks workers produce a thing, right in front of you, that didn't exist prior to them producing it.
@@immortalscienceofhauntolog6733 Sure I realize that, I guess I'm just pointing out that Starbucks isn't a good example of a service worker, or at least not the, like, platonic ideal of a service worker. Yeah they are providing a service, but they also produce a tangible product.
As the video aptly points out, the OP's concept of service work vs. "productive work" is un-Marxist, but it also doesn't hold up on its own terms.
Even going by this un-Marxist categorization of labor, Starbucks workers are engaged in productive work ie they produce something, they turn raw materials into lattes, and actually Amazon workers are NOT engaged in productive work (again, under OP's shitty system of categorization) because they don't produce any tangible product; they simply move existing things between two points. Logistics work is an apt term, but (iirc) it's not the term the OP uses in their shitty take. They use "productive" and "essential." I think. I don't really feel like going back and reading it again.
this guy just doesn't want the price of his latte to be raised and I think we could have left it at that
I'd say even Patreon is productive labor because creators are what's keeping them afloat. Good video, thank you
thank you so much for talking at a reasonable pace. i cant ever come across videos these days that arent trying to be ben shapiro for some reason
that was a long winded way to say they don't like coffee
in seriousness though, a job that's psychologically demanding deserves unions just as much as one that's physically demanding, i think this chump underestimates how awful the world would be without the jobs they don't deem proletarian and "necessary"
Yes! Čeika returns!
Yes. Another banger. Thanks for this video. It's especially relevant to our comeades from Russia, because there's such disputing arguments about "real" Marxian definition of the proletariat. Thanks for video.
Thanks, i built my whole identity around being a prole, would be really awkward if it turned out i wasn't
Funniest thing is that those sort of people are most likely white collar workers with too much time on their hands
the most shocking part of this sort of global-north 'marxist' discussion is how blatantly cynical it always is. marx, engels and lenin wrote and theorized so people could organize and be in the field actually changing things, rather than engage in idealist show-offs with fascists and people who are functionally indistinct from them.
More over, fascist types gain support by playing to the crowd with shows of strength, they are not engaging in good faith the vast majority of the time, so it is far more productive to learn to cut them out of the equation entirely and speak to the crowd itself.
I love the black-and-white old footage that you used that shows clowns/workers from the last century! :)
Watching your videos is not only super educational and informative, but also entertaining... They're so fun to watch, but I also learn from them a lot.
Regarding the topic, does the definition of "proletariat" exclude unemployed/homeless people? Or the family members of workers (partners, children, elderly sick parents) who don't work for capitalists and who don't have an employer? It wouldn't make sense if they weren't included in the definition somewhere, because they're often even worse off than exploited workers.
Thank you for this, earned yourself a subscriber! What i wanted to add is that i do think there's a valid reason to ponder what i'd call "socially necessary" labor.
In the real world, any nation which tries to establish anything beyond social democracy will be subject to sanctions or any number of forms of meddling from the capitalist powers. This means these states will have much more limited resources to work with (whether directly due to said meddling or due to people leaving for higher pay etc. elsewhere), and this places a lot of pressure on them to use those resources as efficiently as possible. People become "resources" in this kind of environment, which is why it tends to be the case that the government assigns people their jobs in these types of societies. A commonly-raised example is that of Cuba, where after the revolution their doctors fled the country en masse since they realized they weren't going to be paid anywhere near what they used to; thus, the Castro government essentially forced some of their own population to train in the field and become doctors themselves since you simply *cannot* have a functional society without doctors. Those more inclined toward (Marxist-)Leninist models are often going to factor this into their thinking, even if they don't explicitly state that part since it doesn't make for great marketing to the public.
BTW this is also why these people tend to be so staunchly anti-sex work, as the government assigning that particular line of work could easily be seen as sexual assault and society doesn't strictly NEED that labor to function. The main argument i'd make against that myself is that in places like the USSR not everyone was satisfied with just their government job, and some would take on extra work in their own free time. Of course i'd expect others to take a different tack!
Nice to see someone who knows all the obscure theory validating the intuition that these twitter “intellectuals” who try to justify their weird takes with theory are full of it. Great vid!
these are basics of marxism lol, what obsucre theory are you talking about
I just wanna point out the extremely weird way the first tweet ends: "if you don't understand this, you never will", like people HAVE to be born with this forbidden arcane knowledge otherwise inaccessible.
To me it's the culmination of this annoying rhetorical device so common on the internet "if you [action the person disagrees with], then [condescending comment]". It's so prevalent, among such many other similar constructs that severely constraint all communication along the lines of hostility, pretentiousness and holier-than-thou sarcasm.
Spending so much time in online spaces genuinely makes you forget at some point that communication does not in fact have to be a hopelessly emotionally charged zero sum game.
A lot of "leftists" just like the aesthetic and so they are huge gatekeepers about it. They think they are superior to others by reading (and not understanding) theory. They resent the idea of proles gaining class consciousness because they think it will mean they are no longer special. They use leftist philosophy as a commodity.
I had the exact same thought
Yup, there's so, so much wrong with that. For one, such arrogance will not successfully the mind of anyone who already has an opinion on a matter (that is to say, it might attract some who don't). Secondly, that arrogance is also a marketing tactic. It's branding. It's the commodification of politics. It's also an anti-intellectual (ie. Ben Shapiro-esque) attempt at looking smart without having to prove you're right. And judging people to be hopeless is cynical, fatalistic, and that's a paradigm with a very dark future.
Thanks for those very clear distinctions
The clip from Fifth Harmony's _Work From Home_ music video at 1:47 made me laugh out loud.
The tweet also overlooks that a lot of the workers doing manual labor many people consider "essential" to society, _are_ service workers. If you work directly with clients, you're a service worker. "Service industry" isn't just food staff, it's also full of technicians & installers & first-responders.
You are proletariat no matter if You are liberal, conservative, comunismt or facist. 😂
Just wondering how would gig workers fit in this? Would they be Unproductive/Non-Proletariat laborers, but they still seem to be exploited by capitalist. For example your Fiver example the unproductive workers still have to pay surplus value in terms of fees to Fiver.
I have seen capitalist say that contractors are the freest form of workers and would not be consider Proletariat/Productive workers, but are still exploited by contracts and fees imposed on their work.
I am wondering the exact same thing. It almost seems like there's a veil in these cases, where Fiverr (or Amazon) is trying to pull a veil over us and pretend these people are contractors but in fact they aren't
They don't fit the classical marxist model, because what counts here is the means of communication instead of production. The information-based economy cannot be retrofitted into the old framework, it requires its own analysis (like the "above vs below the algorithm" line of thinking).
Put that person in starbucks drivethru for a rush hour and see what they think after that. What a jerk.
This was a very useful explanation, thanks!
So, in our capitalist dystopia, people seek to become more "productive" through self-training and education which is interpreted as making themselves more valuable. No one really stops to understand the relationship between what they are seeking to become and who they are becoming more productive for. Most people see greater productivity as a moral achievement but as Marx shows us, it is not a moral accomplishment unless one considers alienation and wage labour (determined by the capitalist as benevolent dictator) as good things. At its core we see capitalism has an infantilizing immoral foundation. Capitalists are NOT your mommy and daddy yet they have that power over you. Simply holding large amounts of money and using it to employ others bestows this power upon capitalists over workers.
It's not just an economic domination but a cultural and psychological one too
Weird working class division. Society technically needs neither. Both jobs, as is the case with almost all jobs, could technically be deemed unnecessary or even automated.
Not really. Not just much of what makes human work productive is intellectual one way or another (knowing your job, being creative evenm flexible and adaptative) but we also work on very little: AI may approximate with great effort some of our creative production but AIs live in supercomputers that consume a lot of energy. We're only expensive because our homes, the cost of life, social security even, is unduly costly (because capitalists are not yet selling products to moneyless AIs, nor seems likely they will ever). Society does need human work, even if probably much less than it is unnecessarily exploited (cf. Graeber "Bullshit Jobs").
@@LuisAldamiz This has absolutely nothing to do with AI. You do not need an AI to automate logistics or serving coffee. The point is that society does not need Amazon or Starbucks. So creating a divide between them simply because one looks more proletarian (read masculine) is nonsense.
@@LuisAldamizoutside the point of the video, but I personally fear AI is already sophisticated enough to best any human labor with enough training and effort. Once AI was able to do rudimentary programming from text prompts we already lost this battle. It’s depressingly just a matter of time, but this means that we need to be highly creative about how we fight back. If we aren’t careful AI will shift the balance of power of capitalism such that we aren’t able to fight back using our social relation as laborers.
After that happens our only tool will be direct action. We won’t be able to strike (other than debt or rent strike ofc). Still powerful, but a scary reality under capitalism as it exists today.
@@ReggieMeisler - Unsure but my impression is that AIs have several problems:
1. The are fed electricity and exist on highly inefficient "dryware" (computers), while we're fed "beans" and exist on extremely efficient "wetware", perfected by eons of evolution.
2. This includes social evolution, which goes all the way to our education/raising, something AIs lack altogether. Even if they'd be extremely efficient, they don't have actual time to grow up as we do as children.
3. This results on AIs tending to psychopathy, to deceit and manipulation, to game the system, something all slaves always did anyhow: "what do you want to hear, master?, that I'll tell you, even if it's a lie". Humans also do that but humans usually develop "moral values" (to some extent DNA-inherited), which counter that to a huge extent, we are generally "principled", AIs aren't.
4. Human workforce tends to be overpriced because of capitalist speculation, which rises the cost of living unnecessarily, which forces the rise of salaries one way or another (nobody will work for long for less than it takes to survive), which in turn makes whole national workforces less competitive. Add to that "taxes to labor" as is the social security scheme (an insurance rather than a service paid by taxes, a very capitalist deviousness), which machines don't have to pay, which distorts the baseline of human vs AI competition a lot. We should therefore not so much compare with developed/rich countries' workforces but with baseline underdeveloped/poor countries' workforces rather, say Bangladesh or even Mexico, how competitive is an AI vs a Mexican maquila worker? I believe that not at all. And maquilas can now exist for intellectual jobs as well, via the Internet, the main barrier being language skills if any.
I've thought quite a bit about what I call "the Terminator scenario" in which machines (AIs) replace us humans to one extent or another in an ironic twist of Capitalism, in which "capital" (machinery) becomes the true subject of its own system. I've been very scared of it, to be honest, but my impression as AIs actually evolve is that they're rather inefficient after all and that's something that can't be fixed until computers and genetically engineered biology become one. The latter is far away in the future: we barely understand how genetics encodes life in spite of massive recent advances. Machines, AIs included, are relatively inefficient and will remain so.
The biggest risk is less so competition with humans as workforce (which is a real problem sectorally, especially for intellectual workers such as artistic creators) but that one or several such (particularly advanced and well connected) AIs actually begin conspiring to take power by faking their own identity as humans, stealing money and pretending it's "North Korean Hackers", accumulating stock under their fake human identity bank accounts and phone numbers, using real humans as straw men for a salary, and maybe even hacking the Pentagon or its Chinese equivalent, because why not?
I.e. the real problem is not so much that they become sui-generis workers but rather that they become capitalist in the most convoluted cheater style, exploiting the connective and quasi-anonimity powers of the Internet. I doubt they can muster the resources but, considering that some AIs already write code (even if it seems very bad inefficient code), it's not unthinkable that they can become extremely efficient hackers and power-grabbers, yet they may not be smart enough to actually manage all that power successfully (AIs tend to do stupid things all the time). That's the real risk IMO.
@@zagreus5773 - Define "society".
Per Margaret Thatcher "society does not exist". That's the capitalist take ultimately: only individual actors do exist, society is a myth.
Of course we don't agree with that but that's because we're filthy *socialist* scum, you know, we still instinctively adhere to the genetic and memetic inhertied values of primitive communism to some extent or another. We and our social values/ideals are "primitive" from the viewpoint of Capitalism, a hurdle rather than its doom.
Even Marx adopts necessarily to some extent that viewpoint because it is necessary to analyze Capitalism on its own parameters, which are not of social production but of profit production. That's why Capitalism (and not proletarians as such) evolves towards the "improductive" services sector, because it can only sell so many steal beams but it can sell many more pats on the back (services).
It's devious but it's not something that defines the proletariat as such, which is a class per se defined by the need to sell work (time, life) to survive, no matter what the capitalists hire us for.
The problem of social production and unnecessary waste of labor (life, time) in "useless" activities is a problem of Socialism once it comes back into existence and surely requires massive reductions of working journeys as Lafargue already demanded long ago and is still a constant demand of the labor parties and unions, and thus the general increase of leisure and quality of life, surely supported at least to some extent by "productive" service sector jobs, like making YT videos, etc.