The Proletariat and the Problem of Unproductive Labor
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- Опубликовано: 28 сен 2024
- My Patreon: / cuck
My Twitter: / philosophycuck
CritiqueOfPoleEcon’s Substack page: substack.com/@...
Article on productive labor: open.substack....
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.o...
Theories of Surplus Value: www.marxists.o...
Capital, Vol. 1: www.marxists.o...
Capital, Vol. 2: www.marxists.o...
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?
_"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, RUclips 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.
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 RUclips, 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.
"Does an Amazon worker suddenly become unproductive when they ship Marvel merchandise?" is such a banger 1 line retort to this idea
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.
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.
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 😅
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
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
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.
@@brianb.6356 srry my rhetoric is too low for better comments
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.
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 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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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?
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
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.
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.
"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...
That Logo_Daedalus post would have been really good if it were meant as engagement bait but the guy literally believes that garbage.
Me in a too-long line at Whataburger: the food workers are not proletarian because they conspire against me to make me wait forever
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 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
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 🚆 ✈🛴🕌
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
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.
The idea that Capitalism doesn't require a caffeinated workforce is laughable to me, like have you never been to a job 😂
(I know plenty of people do not drink caffeine or if they do, don't get it from Starbucks - I'm pointing out the ridiculousness of suggesting that people who provide a chemical that such a large number of people rely on to help medicate themselves FOR DOING LABOR WHILE EXHAUSTED, aren't part of the machine being exploited)
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.
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.
Really good video and explaination, Jonas. As always, a pleasure to hear from you. Hope to hear more from you soon!
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.
Reminds me of the political cartoon of the townsfolk storming the castle with torches and pitchforks. The advisor is panicking while the king is calm and says, "We just need to convince the ones with pitchforks that the ones with torches want to burn their pitchforks." Capitalists are absolutely thrilled to see a burgeoning resurgence in unions undermined by workers of different industries fighting each other for the scraps the capitalists allow to fall from the table rather than standing in solidarity. This is exactly like the people screaming those very Amazon workers don't deserve $15/hr because paramedics don't get that much. They're both underpaid! Stand in solidarity!
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
This is a banging channel. Super clear, articulate, and well-sourced; keep up the good work!
Taking the argument at the start of the video to extreme, you do not “need” anything outside of the bare basics (food, water, shelter, medicine) and anyone laboring for an owner of a company is not a proletarian if their work isn’t somehow producing or transporting bare necessities
A guy who cleans the toilets at a news station is not proletarian because society doesn’t need clean toilets or news
Also appealing to only classify people as proletarians who do stuff that “the economy” requires. As if ‘the economy’ isn’t a vague abstraction usually invoked to justify the status quo and a set of incentives that reward greed and hierarchy at the expense of the average worker)
Whether he likes it or not, a huge section of “the economy” in America is entertainment to stave off mental illness, despair of neoliberalism, lack of community
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 RUclipsrs 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. RUclips "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.
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"
Appreciate you touching on how the early aesthetics of labor seems to inform misguided ideas about what counts as "productive," i.e. if it doesn't involve a burly person wielding a hammer in the manner of early Soviet propaganda art, it isn't "productive."
We need to develop a new aesthetic of labor instead of relying on older imagery, but contemporary labor aesthetics have been so co-opted in corporate pop art that even beginning seems daunting.
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.
As a Libertarian, I'm glad I listened to this. Very informative
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
I ordered your book today as christmas present for myself. You are very good at not promoting it but I figured out it's existance even though it took a couple of years!
it's a really good read, hope you enjoy it as much as i did!
@@kkandenI'll have to give it a check out
this guy just doesn't want the price of his latte to be raised and I think we could have left it at that
man I love criticofpolecon his stuff being used warms my heart
Yes! Čeika returns!
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.
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 ! :)
The idea that food industry service workers are not providing a necessity is the most Bourgeois take on food ever. Like “let them eat cake” bad
All these shit takes about who is or isn’t a real proletarian can be summarized to “women are bourgeois”
You are proletariat no matter if You are liberal, conservative, comunismt or facist. 😂
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
Put that person in starbucks drivethru for a rush hour and see what they think after that. What a jerk.
Nothing makes armchair communists angrier than the working class organizing, unionizing and gaining power.😂
This vid tighten's up a number of things for me.
Thanks!
If I'm a hot muscular guy in a hardhat who walks around construction sites on my own time-not doing any actual construction work-I'm not proletarian.
If I'm a hot muscular guy in a hardhat who walks around construction sites-not doing any actual construction work-because I get paid by a guy who wants to make it look like there's construction work going on-even though there isn't-I am proletarian.
are barbers proletarian? i remember coming back from lockdown and being treated like gold because the town couldnt survive growing their hair out for 6 weeks. what does "a society" really "need?"
I just started reading Das Kapital to fully explore the core philosophy/theory of Engels & Marx. I don't know if this guy has even read Kapital but I noticed a paragraph in the CHAPTER 1 that kind of deflates the arbitrary division of labor that is presented in the tweet. Let me know if this is an incorrect take, as I am still somewhat new to these concepts.
Chapter 1 Page 28 (starting at the middle of the 3rd to last paragraph)
"Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various
kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but
what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract.
Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial
reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended
without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human
labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them.
When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are - Values"
I believe, with my limited exposure to theory, that the tweet arbitrarily and without justification places higher value upon labor that produces tangible goods rather than services. The productivity claim may possibly stem from an implicit bias that assumes Amazon workers produce more value than Starbucks workers. It's somewhat of a petty distinction. In my opinion, any collective bargaining on behalf of workers regardless of the assumed use value of their labor is better for everyone involved. The profit margins of both of these companies are astronomical. the primary method of profit maximization for any company is the same i.e. labor exploitation.
anyways that is just my take. I'm still reading the theory here and there but it does seem rather intuitive so far. It's a shame the USA has such an aversion to economic theory that would vastly improve their material conditions.
I don't care either way. I want this shit all automated. Who wants to be a productive worker? Marx called it a "misfortune." Both sides are fetishizing labor in a way Marx never did. Dead labor is what's emancipatory. The only way to produce more dead labor is to remove as much living labor from the production process. Social production is a curse upon mankind. Give us free-time. Both sides who want to try and reclaim productive labor, without realizing the most unproductive labor in the entire economy is the government, are reactionaries, and do not understand Marx's essential argument that the ratio of productive to unproductive labor would grow so vast that the work-day would be mostly spent producing absolutely nothing of material consequence to the laborer re: commodity production. In fact, it is time spent that adds nothing to wages and nothing to profit. Totally empty-time. With the breakdown of exchange-value (Grundrisse), SNLT doesn't determine the price of commodities---including labor-power. You wouldn't know this, because in constant dollars, it all appears socially necessary. But what if the state has to constantly reduce the purchasing power of the entire working to raise the rate of surplus-value? That is, what if the breakdown of money is itself the breakdown of productive labor? This is the fundamental problem. Not determining who, or what sector of the economy, is most proletariat. Who the fuck wants to be proletariat anyways? Abolish this shit.
EXACTLY
I agree with the guy in some way. Coffee work is bitch work, warehouse work is work that's a bitch.
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.
Ah yes, people who prepare convenience food and beverages. Roles that will certainly disappear after the revolution and have no analogues in pre-capitalist society. I can't help but roll my eyes.
Your commentary on the transportation workers made think about Uber drivers and other forms of self-employment jobs. To what extent you think the whole discussion about productive and unproductive, or proletarian dichotomy, is relatable to workers that pursue these types of jobs (more broadly, "uberification" of the work world)?
A Starbucks barista takes raw materials - coffee beans, water, sugar, milk etc. - and turns them into a material product, coffee. In that way, a barista is actually very similar to a productive worker by any real or made up definition, e.g. a carpenter, a factory worker or whatever. The only difference is, that the product is more transient than a chair and the like.
The same is true for you, who produces non-fungible goods such as youtube videos - it's still a product.
None of this changes your point. It just goes to show that the people who claim that baristas are non-productive either say this in bad faith or are to stupid to understand their own points.
This has same energy as the parent who thinks being youtuber is not a real job. Despite having demand and despite it probably makes better than said parent
If you hate baristas, it is not because they are bourgeois. It is because you are a Karen.
I say some of those unsavory things you mentioned at the beginning, but with some caveats. Namely, that the distinction between productive and unproductive labor is not as relevant in modern labor dispute discussions. The distinction I see is between those who seek to protect themselves from the consequences of the labor itself, like a factory worker, and those who seek to protect their space in life to make other people call them something, like a writer. This makes the Starbucks union much more closely aligned with the interests of the factory workers and much less so with sag-aftra et al. You might say "precariat" for the precarious nature of the job or being dismissed from it vs a generic proletariat. To me in a world where capital is so entrenched in our lives that we aren't allowed to not participate, this distinction makes much more sense.
This argument sounds similar to some Maoist Third Worldists who just want to argue that there is no real Proletariat in the Imperial Core countries of the Global North.
But that is true though.
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra no
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra
"By proletariat, the class of modern wage laborers who, having no means of production of their own, are reduced to selling their labor power in order to live. Except those in global north, fuck them privileged little shits."
Marx in the Communist Manifesto
@@ZenobiaofPalmyra No it isn't, this is just Oppression Olympics shit.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs Labor aristocrat!!
Some people are saying this is why leftist discussion is so bad, I say the exact opposite. Take a look at how uniformly people kicked this guys (rhetorical) teeth in over this, both in their tone and their argumentation. You can be upset over this person being so grossly out of touch with what was written, but focusing and lamenting on the noisome outliers is exactly what the bosses want you to do. They want you demoralized and checked out.
Critiqueofpolecon was my mutual i miss them!
fyi that guy is posting an average of 52 tweets a day, talk about unproductive labor.
At first glance, when bourgeois unions were mentioned, I thought they referred to one of those business owners organisations.
A lot of these ideas (like the value produced by transportation) are covered by Adam Smith, who is officially an acceptable source to every liberal who never read a word of him. So if you try to discuss anything along these lines with a non-leftist, it is probably best to lean more heavily on him than on Marx.
It is amusing to me that most of Marx's work is just an elaboration on what Smith had already written but people often act like he's some sort of far out eccentric.
does this mean that technically, people who work for a state to receive a wage isn’t proletarian because there is no owner taking the surplus?
no, there doesn't have to be a 'classic' capitalist for a wage worker to be proletarian. the capitalist is just used as the example, because we're looking at capitalism in its ideal average. the owner taking the surplus value in that example would be the state.
thank you for the clarrification! @@w3b436 ❤
I agree with most things you are saying but I'm wondering how useful such an exercise in debunking is. Logo_Daedalus probably thinks the way he does not because he is an inattentive reader, but because his worldview somehow resonates with his lifeworld and the lifeworld of his followers. Therefore, I think it would be better not to treat such a position as a mere misconception that should be corrected by educating the fools about the correct marxism, but as a symptom of the contemporary form of the class contradiction, which requires a critical reengagement with Marx. The antagonisation of productive vs. unproductive labour seems to mirror the contemporary fetishisation of use-value over exchange-value, which is widespread in many different corners of the political compass (as you point out). To the use-value-fetishist as well as the productive-labour-fetishist, Marx' assumption, that capital produces the means for its own overcoming seems to have become implausible. In Marx' framework, the production of surplus-value (no matter how useful the product) incentivises automation, which in turn has the potential to free up labour-time. At the same time, this development of the organic composition of capital requires a development of social reproduction (education, public health, a wealth distribution that allows for consumption) which ultimately requires a socialisation of capital. The productive forces develop in a dialectical relation to the relations of production, the job of the revolutionary class struggle is to actualise this dialectics, to realise capitalisms emancipatory potential. What use-value-fetishists and productive-labour-fetishists experience is how the expansion of unproductive labour fills in for the development of the productive forces. Instead of requiring an education and a fair share of the socially produced surplus-value (which would ultimately require the socialisation of capital), people are being coerced into minimum-wage barista-jobs that don't require any education or bullshit office jobs that still create the appearance of being educated and useful. The expansion of unproductive labour in this way solves the problem of overproduction, it is a counterrevolutionary sublation of the dialectics of the productive forces and the relations of production.
This does of course not mean that the class struggle should exclude unproductive labour, but it poses the question, how a revolutionary politics could still be possible. Théorie communiste (for different but related reasons) proposed a revolutionary politics, that seeks to abolish both the proletariat as well as the value-form, in other words, the contemporary form of the class contradiction makes it necessary for the class struggle to act against the subjective interest of the proletariat. I think that this is not only problematic but can only fail, but still it points out the debacle of contemporary class struggle. As paradoxical as it may seem, guys like Logo_Daedalus do a very similar thing, when they try to separate a proper productive core-proletariat that still requires the development of the productive forces and therefore could still have a revolutionary potential, from the ways in which the revolutionary subjectivity of the proletariat is captured through unproductive labour, in proposing that the productive part of the proletariat has to act against the subjective interest of its unproductive part, which is bound to fail for the very same reasons. The problem of contemporary marxist theory is how to think through this debacle.
I agree with your main point but it's important to point out that baristas are not unproductive according to Marx in the same way lawyers or doctors are.
“Bourgeois service work” 😂 yes McDonalds employees working the register are clearly part of the ownership class.
On the whole I mostly agree, but it seems to make three interrelated missteps. The first is focusing on productive labour, which as you point out, isn't really what the proletariatization is about. On this front Marx's arguments about the short term importance for unions to increase wages for workers of all stripes seems sufficient. The other subsidiary point is missing what I assume to be, I haven't seen the argument, the core idea here. Which is that the transformation problem allows for the keeping of workers that have a fundamentally different, and auxiliary, relationship to the mode of production. The two of these together get us to what I assume is the textual basis of their point here, which is probably based on Marx's analysis of servants in v1.
I think the whole issue can be sidestepped by just thinking about interests directly. The question of what Ibankers are clearly has very little bearing on the question of what minimum wage workers are. At the basic level the interests of starbucks workers are clearly well aligned with the interests of the proletariat generally. At the superstructural level, because their work is mediated by the market and they do not own the means of production [this hints at the related and much more difficult problem of how pensions work now] they lack the ideological problems that Marx identifies with his main unproductive workers.
I think a lot of this confusion stems from two things: People's underlying assumptions about the value of certain work, and the increasingly common usage of words like "proletarian" and "bourgeios" as not objective descriptions, but rather compliments and insults. Proletarian is hard work and struggle! Bourgieos is privilege and laziness! Therefore, Amazon workers (hard workers, not privileged) are proletarian, but Starbucks workers (privileged, lazy) are bourgieos.
At the end of the day, as long as people continue to use words other people use, guaging the meaning from context alone, such distortions of definition will always be present. Honestly, it may be useful to change the way we as leftists talk about things, because it is a nightmare to translate things like "Bourgeiosie" and "Dictatorship of the Proletariat" for example when what they really mean is "Capital owners" and "Worker run-state". Probably won't happen though, people will just keep using words wrong.
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.
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?
I love these hot takes on Marx by people who evidently haven't read Capital very carefully if at all. How can people take such a confident tone when spreading misinformation? It's kind of embarrassing, and confuses a kind of naive identity politics with class politics.
"bartenders don't need unions" spoken like someone who's never done the job.
I'll forgo the option of saying something insightful and poignant and simply point out that, upong doing some minor homework on this Logos dude, discovered that he believes paleontology is a sham. Just in case you needed a picture painted.
You're welcome.
@nomickike2165 Hate him? He's a Joy! I love him and his tinfoil hat.
@nomickike2165 Yeah, why not
Look how we divide ourselves. We see the differences between ourselves as chasms, when they’re hardly even a crack in contrast to the differences between ourselves and those who run the world. A teen working at a starbucks has far more in common with an ironworker than a shareholder or a senator.
Lmao. "Society doesn't need Starbucks."
Could you imagine if everyone didn't get coffee for a day? I'm almost certain society would collapse.
I don't get how food workers aren't workers. Imagine thinking society needs more auto manufacturers just because they have the industrial aesthetic.
I love how you use your platform to make a video whenever youre bugged as all hell over the worst takes xD and use it to educate people about stuff :D
Also this is a good reminder that most programmers are proletariat too
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!
we are so back
re: farmers: today, farmers are increasingly alienated from their means of production. You can't just buy seeds and then re-plant your crops after you harvest them, their DNA is patented by the company you bought them from and even if they could physically reproduce you are barred contractually from doing so; you can't just buy and maintain your own tractors and combines, they're DRM-protected and need you to have a license to use them and have a specialist come and turn off the error code for you; and you can't just sell your farming goods, because the prices of crops are driven so low that you can't actually profit on them without navigating the web of government subsidies and, once again, more contracts.
Boohoo
This sounds like such a physiocratic opinion - that one labor is more important than the other. We are all workers under the capitalistic system. If you produce a commodity and you do not get complete compensation for that commodity - as in there is a surplus that is being stripped from you and given to some higher up - then you are part of the proletariat.
Not true. If you sell your labor, you’re a proletarian. Doesn’t mean your labor is inherently necessary in a future mode of production.
but marxs definition is stuck in a 19th century mindset of thinking that capitalism is progressive
it excludes self employed laborers from being productive including self sustaining peasants and co-op workers
for this reason and another i prefer paul cockshotts definition from his 2006 paper called hunting productive work
where he says that labor is productive if its output is part of the real wage
this kind of stuff (that is, a shallow or incomplete understanding of socio-political ideas and concepts) happens an awful lot on social media. People are way too stoked to get fake internet points by saying all the goodboy words without actually understanding what they're saying.
It's like that one dork talkig about a "woke sky" or whatever tf he was on about
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.
Why is anyone using Twitter anymore anyway