Note: Productive and Unproductive Labour

In Chapter 1 we defined the irrationality of capitalist production in its most general terms, as an opposition between the production of wealth on the one side, and the absolute poverty of the working class, on the other. As productivity improves, this irrationality asserts itself as a series of contradictions within capitalism between what are often called the forces and the relations of production. This perspective is inadequate rather than false, and we are now in a position to see its limitations. If the analysis is not developed beyond this stage, the irrationality of capitalism can appear as though it were only partial; since it is consistent with this view to define capitalism as essentially a mode of producing use-values to satisfy human needs, but one which is distorted and made inefficient by its particular social organisation (production for need versus production for profit). This perspective is encapsulated in the definition of productive labour in terms of use-value. In fact, the irrationality of capitalist production is complete and the production of use-values is nothing more than an inevitable but incidental constraint upon accumulation. Hence the practical definition of productive labour in capitalist society is not that labour which produces use-values, but that which produces surplus value. The usefulness of a product does not count here; or even the fact that it is necessary and indispensible for social reproduction: the preoccupation of capital with its own self-expansion is so complete that everything else is incidental. Only that labour which produces surplus value is productive, the rest is unproductive.