Class, Productive and Unproductive Labour - Journal of Alternative ...

Dr. Timothy Kerswellwith larger sectors involved in capitalist production havetheir economic performance underreported.The extension from this is that countries with productionsectors which produce goods for export are actuallyexporting surplus value, with that surplus value beinghidden in the prices of intermediate as opposed to final sale.This effectively hides the value that was produced by theproduction sector by making the claim that the value wassomehow generated in circulation.What this means is that there is a material basis for acontradiction between the productive sector workers who areinvolved with the creation of value, and the workersassociated with social consumption either in the form ofcirculation or of social maintenance, whose work and whosewages are paid out of the surplus value produced by theproductive labourers. This is because a reduction in the rateof surplus value, an increase in the productive sector wageshare, would necessarily lead to a decrease in the shareafforded to the other spheres of labour as well as the shareto capital. Capitalists as a social class therefore, share atemporary identity of interest with the workers involved insocial consumption to maximize the exploitation ofproductive labourers. This remains the case even if thesocial consumption workers are involved with a separatedivergence of interest with the capitalists who employ them,and an ensuing conflict over the distribution of surplusvalue that has been created through the process ofproduction. This structural contradiction acts as adisincentive to acts of solidarity between workers of theglobal North and workers of the global South, but alsobetween production and consumption workers as a whole.In Marxist terms, this means that the capitalists, theproductive workers and the social consumption workers mayeach be classes in themselves.In testing the theory that there is a contradiction betweenproduction and non-production workers, it is necessary toclosely examine the general characteristics of certain kindsof work. In making a distinction between production39