I never understood how a worker's production of a service could be argued as unproductive just because it does not create a physical commodity that remains after the work is done Producing a service surely maintains the same amount of value as an equally productive creation of a tangible product, as it took the worker's workforce to create both and neither would exist without it
Service workers are not “equally productive.” A service is used up in the very instant of its performance and does not realise itself in any particular subject or vendable commodity which, if necessary, can put into motion a quantity of labour equal to that which had originally produced it, reimbursing its employer. It does not “maintain” anything. Their service, however socially necessary, is unproductive of any value, it produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured. Service work does not grow capital, service labour is itself, however useful, a running expense of the enterprise.
funny to see someone like cockshott respond to leftist twitter discourse that said, the analysis is very good, hope to see more stuff like this in the future
You know what'd be a good topic for a future video? Something on Lysenko/Lysenkoism. I read the chapter on it in Dialectical Biologist recently and I think it'd be a good thing for someone knowledgeable to expand on.
Rosa Luxemburg: From this point of view, the music-hall dancer whose legs sweep profit into her employer’s pocket is a productive worker, whereas all the toil of the proletarian women and mothers in the four walls of their homes is considered unproductive. This sounds brutal and insane, but corresponds exactly to the brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy. And seeing this brutal reality clearly and sharply is the proletarian woman’s first task.
@@lukebruce5234 do you think the continued maintenance of social wellbeing is not valuable to a society? do you not think that is, in effect, what child tax benefits are?
@@lukebruce5234 of course, child benefits were extremly high in socialist countries. In socialist Czechoslovakia it would reach 1/3 of your salary and families with disabled children were given even greater compenzation as high as a standart salary if the child was severly disabled or suffered from bad illnes, not even talking about all the free child care which was avaible to everybody
@@bumam6665 In CSSR only the women taking care of children under the age of 2 were given child benefits. In 1982 it was 600 crowns for one child and 900 for two and that was only for the women who left work or school. Then there was of course maternity leave on top of that but I don't think we should view that as child benefits. The average salary in 82 was 2765. Not quite 1/3rd salary. By the way I don't know if you know this but all female professions were heavily underpayed in CSSR. The average salary in 1989 was 3100 but a nurse would make just 1600 🤣🤣🤣 A miner made 5800, a soldier 5000. A construction welder 4800. But an elementary school teacher made 1850. 😂😂😂 Yeah it was a pretty red pilled society. Women were kind of forced to marry men to even have enough money to survive. Probably not the answer you wanted to hear brother but it is what it is. 🤯
@@lukebruce5234 Dear friend, You are focusing only on the direct child benefits, money given on hand-cash(for which you forgot to add the money you would get immidietly after birth which makes few hunderds in addition). Maternity leave is of course a child benefit as well as free kindergarde etc. But what you are forgeting is the insane deduction from tax(if you had three children it would be 50% write of just like that every month) plus interest free loans and extremly cheap housing for new families. We also have to count that for every child the mother would go sooner to pension. All this probably makes more than 1/3 of income. Today in czech republick the only benefit you get is the "early" pension leave(they are moving the pensione year further and further. I as a young person will not be able to leave for pension if we dont do socialist revolution) and tax write off which comes to around 17% of average salary(if you have three children). "female profesions" - ČSSr saw massive rise in female employment acrooss all fields, its true that the positions you have presented here have been paid less than average but not by the margin you present here. I have a official statistical years book(it goes upto 1983 and stats presented will be from 1983) and in it I read average wage paid without JZD 2789 Kčs; agriculture 2790 Kčs; industry 2921 Kčs; construction 3106 Kčs; reaserch and science 3178 Kčs; education 2606 Kčs; medicine 2602(i know this clumbs up both doctors and nurses together but the shere number of nurses statistically outperforms the doctors. Your exmaples are either way off(please tell me your source) or dont represent the trutf. I would bet that the miner is probably mining in uranium mines where there was extra pay due to the hazardouse conditions etc. And i found that nurses would make 2955 Kčs in 1988 with average being 3095 Ksč(www.penize.cz/mzda-a-plat/238337-male-penize-mzdy-za-komunismu-a-dnes-zbohatli-jsme-skoro-vsichni!#inflace-vypocet). So your argument is just wrong. Red pilled society? I see so you are rotted muricamud probably. Here in Czechoslovakia it wasnt no redpilled society, it was a socialist society in which worker could buy a flat or family house and have extra property for recreation in wildrness, three kids, car and a dog + paid leave in free reacreational centres. It was society where women were reaching the highest positions in production and were actually compenzeted for their pregnancy. Your attempt to smere my homeland falls short when faced with the smallest amount of actually data.
You might want to do a video summarizing your definition of productive labor in your paper “Hunting Productive Work.” The Smithian definition can get confusing, and I think you were spot on in defining productive work by its relationship to the real wage fund. As you said, services like food preparation are certainly productive so long as they are producing for the common market (where workers make purchases with wages). The fundamental factors of production are the workforce and the means of production. The question as to whether a product or service is productive is whether it goes into one of these two factors, or else it is extraneous to them and therefore unproductive. The proletariat are the main productive force of society, so their real wage is the measure of whether labor is used productively. I would argue that this is the case for education as well (and not just industrial training). A history class in an elite university is unproductive not because history education is unproductive, but because in this case it is a luxury service that doesn’t enter the real wage. But history courses made free online, or provided in community colleges is arguably productive (the product taking the form of information.) I would argue that this the same thing for entertainment, sporting goods, etc. If it’s produced for the workers market, it is productive, if it’s priced out of it, it is not. I think these conversations are important, because one of the goals of communism has been the socialization of domestic labor. Domestic labor has wrongly been ignored or treated as unproductive, but of course the domestic economy is largely what feeds, cares for and reproduces the workforce. Socializing this sector through public restaurants, laundries, day cares and hairdressers is key to eliminating patriarchal exploitation as well as saving on labor time in providing these services to the associated producers.
I agree but it's a shame you didn't include this quotation from Capital Vol 1: "If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to be labouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation" Also heating milk to 100C will scauld it and ruin the coffee! Source: ex-barista haha
@@paulcockshott8733 Fair enough! Also thank you for your work explaining marxian economics in practice on TH-cam. It's surprisingly rare to find a channel that does that.
Its seems to me like an attempt to say unproductive workers cannot be exploited therefore theyre not a part of working class. That is not a useful stance to have if you wanna build class consciousness in society, quite the opposite
It’s true that we shouldn’t shun organizing workers in the unproductive sectors. Just arguing strategically, there’s some value in having the power to shut down the country clubs and luxury shops of the capitalists to hit them where it hurts. But the reason why we have to make the distinction is because, as communists, we want to eliminate income based on the exploitation of others labor. Unproductive labor drains the productive sector of labor and resources, and reduces the overall wealth available to society. For that reason, we have to consider organizing all workers with an eye to establishing an economy that uses labor to provide goods and services for society as a whole, instead of wasting labor on the wealthy few
"unproductive" only means the labor they produce isn't generative of surplus value, all the value of their labor is consumed at the point of its performance; ie, it doesn't make the capitalist richer, it makes them poorer as pure consumption (like the way we spend money or time to maintain ourselves)
According to the definitions presented here not all workers are exploited. Not in the capitalistic sense. You could argue that any worker that is paid less than the value of their labour is exploited but that is a pre-capitalist relationship. For capitalistic exploitation to occur it has to be in A. the production of a physical good, B. the production of goods in Department I (production of means of production) or Department IIa (necessities). Workers involved in the production of luxury goods like military arms or pet clothing are not being exploited because their pay comes out of the surplus already generated by living labour in I+IIa and therefore the labour of the luxury sector worker is constrained to never generating new wealth. It does not harm class consciousness to know this rather improves it because for example in Britain, the government advances plans called “levelling-up schemes” which look to push workers into so-called “high-wage, high-skill work” which involves insurance, marketing, and equity. Why should workers accept their labour going into the unproductive services to help maintain the profits of the rich?
I wanted to comment on how you accounted for the exploitation of a barista’s labor. I like that you commented on the depreciation of the equipment, although I think the added cost per cup would be slightly higher than a few p like you say. The machines used cost upwards of $150k and are used for a few years, but generally a coffee shop will have 2-3 such machines. On top of the initial cost there is also maintenance costs. As a barista I know that our machines have to be serviced minimum of once every week or two. Aside from depreciation and maintenance of equipment, however, the most glaring discrepancy in the cost of labor that I notice in your calculation is the fact that it assumes baristas are making 1 flat white every 90 seconds for the entirety of their shift. This is not accurate. This discounts all labor performed other than the actual making of coffee. For every barista making a cup of coffee every 90 seconds there are 5-7 other workers in the coffee shop who aren’t actively making a flat white but are performing labor to support the making of the flat white: the worker taking the order, the worker performing the role of cashier, the worker cleaning dishes, the worker stocking the milk, cups, lids, coffee, etc. It is also worth noting that the barista who is making the flat white isn’t averaging 1 flat white every 90 seconds for the duration of their shift. There are times when there are no customers and so the barista is not performing labor that produces profit directly. Of course the barista is often still performing labor, but it is labor that isn’t accounted for in your assessment. I bring this up because I have worked as a barista off and on for 8 years and have seen first hand what the actual cost of labor is for chains like Starbucks. Compared to other industries the cost of labor at Starbucks is quite low, but it isn’t as low as your calculations would have it seem. To give an example: in the store where I currently work we average about 45 hours of labor in a 12 hour day. The average cost of labor is about $22.50/hr (yes, I live in the US). This comes out to about $1,012 in labor costs per day. Sales for my store will range between $2,500 and $4,500 depending on the day and a multitude of other factors with an average of about $3,200 per day. This means that labor accounts for about 31.6% of revenue.
Thanks for this analysis. How does the price of maintaining the shop itself diffuse into the prices of the products made there? E.g. the cost of keeping the lights on in the room, the cost of running all the fridges all day, etc. - I'd assume those are also costs that must get priced into the cup of coffee as well.
Good question! I suspect the lighting cost would be comparable to the cost of boiling the water, since LED lights are very efficient and it takes a relatively high wattage heater to boil the water. On shop repair, I have known the Costa in Glasgow central station for some 36 years, during which they have only refurbished it completely once. So the rate of wear and tear on the premises is comparatively low. I dont know how to estimate this since I dont have quotes for fitting out a cafe.
I have a question, so like authors when they write a book and sell it by mass producing them in idk some book making factory, apart from book that was written by the author how would you determine how much the author makes on each book sold? Because the author themselves doesnt write apart from when they initially wrote the book. And another question is things like marketing seen as productive labour? also one more question (last one I promise) how much does marketing have to do with the final value of a product so for example if a phone is manufactured and sold at 100$ but then through marketing the capitalist manages to sell the phone that was previously sold for 100$ for a new price of 1000$, does the value of labour put in change? and how so? If there are videos on this or any resources where I can learn more I would appreciate it
1) Book authors essentially get an intellectual property rent on the books sold, they indeed take no part on the actual production of the books that are actually sold yet take a portion of the profits. 2) Marketing is very interesting, because afaik Marx doesn't talk much about it and clearly it's become far more relevant for modern mass media capitalism than in his time. Marketing crucial for the actual practical realities of capitalist dynamics, as the selling of commodities necessitates consumer knowledge of said commodities. You could say that marketing is the production of information for market consumers, and this information is clearly material: flyers, ads, commercials, billboards, etc. literally have to be produced by labor employed by the capitalist. But it's curious because these products of labor are not sold as commodities, yet unlike unproductive labor they DO generate profit, indirectly, by increasing the consumer base, such that clearly the capitalist does obtain a net profit from investing in marketing. So it seems like there's this dimension of the actual implementation details of the capitalist form of production, that of information networks and influencing consumer choices, which is not well accounted for by classical economic theory. 3) I'm not terribly sure about this, i guess it would be easier to look at empirical data of commodity prices as a function of marketing expenditure. I'd say that marketing is an indirect constant capital cost that becomes necessary for production at larger volumes; in the same way that a larger volume of commodities cannot be sold without greater transportation expenditure to carry the goods to the market, so a larger volume of commodities cannot be sold without informing more customers of the commodity. See it the other way around and it makes more sense, without marketing, more commodities cannot in practical terms be produced without going unsold and not making any profit, so for all intents and purposes marketing "becomes" an overhead cost of production of commodities, which would be reflected in the final price. Of course whatever increase in price would have to be consistent with the labor actually put by the marketing workers in guaranteeing that the produced commodities are actually sold.
The only part of this analysis that I'd quibble about would be the fact that the worker is paid per hour, while the productivity would be per cup of coffee sold, so the exploitation ratio would depend on the amount of coffee made and sold in a shift. It's still going to be quite a lot in any case.
Usually companies institute a “plan” mechanism. In days where the shop sold less than the “plan”, the employees get lower wages. This way the company saves up on wages.
If only American leftists learned to read… The answer is yes. Marx, Capital: “The result, whether men or goods are transported, is a change in their whereabouts. Yarn, for instance, may now be in India instead of in England, where it was produced. However, what the transportation industry sells is change of location. The useful effect is inseparably connected with the process of transportation, i.e., the productive process of the transport industry. Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means. The useful effect can be consumed only during this process of production. It does not exist as a utility different from this process, a use-thing which does not function as an article of commerce, does not circulate as a commodity, until after it has been produced. But the exchange-value of this useful effect is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production (labour-power and means of production) consumed in it plus the surplus-value created by the surplus-labour of the labourers employed in transportation. This useful effect also entertains the very same relations to consumption that other commodities do. If it is consumed individually its value disappears during its consumption; if it is consumed productively so as to constitute by itself a stage in the production of the commodities being transported, its value is transferred as an additional value to the commodity itself.”
So because transport, an indispensable component of the process of production itself, is productive, that means that means that all services, even those entirely separate from the production of material goods, are productive. Fine logic.
Regarding the coffee beans themselves, it seems a rather odd assumption to make that the coffee is being bought at market price and therefore that this is its actual value. if this assumption held, the whole discussion would be moot, since wouldn't that also mean that the baristas are providing their labor at market value, and that the rest of the value is some X factor related to the experience of the coffee shop itself? My assumption would have been to apply the LTV to all layers of the production process. Another question then would be, if coffee is so cheap to make, why don't people just drink it at home? I feel like the appeal of coffee shops is threefold: for the coffee addict, it's accessible in a rush, for people who want to meet, it's a sort of public space, especially in places that have a lack of free and safe public spaces, and finally, it's hip to drink coffee; it's a unique commodity that you can indulge in while also telling yourself and signalling to others that it's also for the benefit of your productivity. There's a certain "striver" image associated with it that I believe makes part of it conspicuous consumption.
I have a query about cashiers. Though they aren't directly producing value, aren't they playing an important role in selling (or circulating commodities) and thus realizing surplus value generated by labour? Without them, wouldn't sales take a hit, which would affect the process negatively? So aren't they productive workers, in the sense that without them the productivity would take a hit? I understand that the role can be mechanized, but that is true for other more direct productive workers too.
The debate is about Marxist terms. In a Marxist sense, cashiers are unproductive. They merely realize the (exchange) value. The word unproductive does not mean they are useless or bad people. Of course you need people who help circulate the value. Marx uses this word merely to explain how the surplus extraction of value by capitalists works. The cashier can be necessary in commerce, just as much as the transporters or the financiers...but the question here is not about need. The question of productivity is simply about who produces the value. The circulation of value is the subject of the book Capital Volume 2, so a big part of this book is about jobs similar to cashiers such as merchants. The core problem of the debate is that one side uses the word in a daily sense (productive = useful or profitable) while the other side uses the words as they are defined in classical economics. People are talking past each other.
The service that cashiers provide only goes towards facilitating exchange. A fundamental argument of the labor theory of value is that value cannot be created in exchange, only through production. Since the labor cashiers perform only facilitates exchange, no new values are produced. It does get tricky today though, because a lot of store clerks are also involved in support tasks relating to transport, storage, food prep and sanitation that arguably are productive. A grocery store is overall unproductive as a store, but arguably productive as a warehouse, and might also have a butcher, baker and deli dept. that would count as productive.
@DrynSarcastic360 right, and I have to preface it by saying I haven't read Capital volume 2. And I understand that cashiers aren't directly producing value. But if there being a cashier, more value is realized per day than if not, then isn't that cashier indirectly "producing" value? I also understand that value is only produced through labour, but can it be argued that the cashier performing their role requires labour, and since there being one or not makes a difference in sales, and thus profits and wages, that they are performing some indirect productive labour?
@@thatman3107 if you’re just thinking in terms of money making, cashiers play a vital role. But the Marxist argument about commodity fetishism is that the world of commodity exchange obscures and distorts the system of use-value production on which it is based. Exchange value needs use values, not the other way around. Money, sales, commodity exchange are not necessary for use-value production, they are dependent on it. Cashier labor is labor that goes into exchange, and is extraneous to actual use-value production. You might be on stronger ground arguing that they perform necessary activities of organizing storage and access to goods (these are concrete use-values, independent of exchange) but this is separate from cashier work proper, which refers simply to facilitating sales. Sales need products, but products do not need to be sold.
@lrgroene I get that by strict definition, a cashier isn't a productive labourer. But I think this definition misses out, or at least underestimates, on the role and importance of cashiers. Because if A is performing labour, and if because of that labour, more value is realized at the end of the day, then is A performing productive labour or not? Maybe if the direct productive workers stop working, there won't be anything for cashiers to sell, and so obviously, cashiers aren't the primary labourers. But to define them as unproductive workers seems to exclude their importance in the functioning of the system because of their labour.
I think the argument you’re missing is what’s being paid for is not actually the Starbucks coffee but the Starbucks experience which is performed by the Starbucks employees. Its muchnmore obviousnin some fancy restaurants which charge more because of the aesthetic or the scenery-the premium is not for the food itself but the experience of going to the establishment itself.
The example is from Costa one of three big chains and multiple small one operating in the UK. The Costa experience is no different from the Cafe Nero or Starbucks one. The prices of all these firms are similar. There is nothing special about any of them, there is a prevailing market price for Latte etc. if you look at the relative prices of expresso versus Latte they correlate with the extra labour to convert an expresso to a Latte. The relative prices are determined by their relative labour contents.
@paulcockshott8733 The labour of a Barista, like other non-productive labour, has a certain value, regulated by the very same principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour: “relative prices are determined by relative labour content.” But, the value of barista labour, however useful it may be, perishes in the very instant of its performance, and does not realise itself in any particular vendable commodity for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured, irrespective of the labour time employed or the price of the service.
There are Costa machines in supermarkets (ASDA and Co-op) you operate yourself and take to the cashier to pay for. It grinds the coffee beans and serves it in a cup. You should explain how this doesn’t contradict labour value, given that a customer would not pay for the raw beans, water and cup separately for the same price. I think a follow-up video might be needed looking at the amount of contention in the comments.
Yes, part of what Costa/Starbucks employees are doing is acting as cashiers, which is unproductive. Did the 90 seconds to make a cup of coffee include ringing up the sale? If not, then the rate of surplus value on the actual making of the coffee would not be quite so high (but probably still very high). Let's say each cup of coffee required 30 seconds of cashier time. Then £3.19 in surplus value per cup of coffee would become £2.39 per cup. Still very high, though.
About transportation and driving, if a HGV is operated by a worker transporting commodities between firms, does his labour count as productive? Obviously it’s a necessary part of the industrial process to have goods like our aforementioned coffee beans delivered en masse, the driver would be doing something that is labour intensive while also perishable; but does his labour actually add any value to the goods he delivers? It seems like the answer would be no since the labour-content was fixed in the commodities by the workers whom made them. However the truck, the fuel which it runs, any toll fees, would all count as constant capital for the owning firm, and the driver’s wages as variable capital which I assume would be contained within the price of the commodity before sale? A company driver has his wages exchange against capital stock since the lorry counts as company property whether he is employed by the firm or subcontracted by another firm. Would this, plus value-added in the price of the commodity, be enough to satisfy Smith’s definitions? Also, his labour is necessary to the realisation of surplus-value in some way because without him how would firms guarantee commodities that are sold for money actually get delivered? Before the Industrial owners have money to spend on luxuries they need to have revenue from sale to divvy up. There would be no revenue for firms if it was all empty promises instead of real goods deliveries. I suppose my question is does he increase surplus-value, and if so how? Does he do it by time-saving in the total production process by operating lorries as productive machinery, so there is an increase in relative surplus-value? Also would it differ if the driver was say transporting commodities like aluminium sheets between firms in Department I for making air freighters, or if he was transporting aluminium from Department I to Department IIb for making private jets? Would a Tesco driver delivering cabbages from farms to retail count as working-class within department IIa? Or between IIa and IIb being employed in IIb? I want to clear my thoughts on this and perhaps it is just me, but it does seem a little convoluted and strange. Why is an increase in surplus-value, grown by a rise in the value fixed in commodities (including labour-power itself) by labour, the measure of productivity? I suppose it is restricted to capitalist relations of production, but under this definition a nurse that takes bloods, or measures the heart rate for a working-age patient would not count as productive. The entire sphere of domestic labour would not count as productive even though it makes human beings. It seems like it is not a definition worth persisting with beyond an analysis of capitalism.
I don't dispute any of the points being made, though I suspect that growing coffee is a labour intensive process. I wonder how much labour time a kilogram of coffee contains. If both the coffee farmer, the many people involved with the processing and logistics of coffee beans, and then finally the barista, would all live in the labour token economy described i TANS, how many labour tokens would a coffee cup be? I suspect the market value for coffee beans doesn't reflect the labour content of the beans. I'll get back if I find out any numbers. Or if anybody knows more, please reply.
Not an expert by any means, but what you're saying is clear as day to anyone not from a western 1st world country. You're saying farmers in Kenya, Brazil, India etc. are exploited and paid pennies instead of dollars. Yes, they are.
To answer my own question, an optimistic estimation of the average labour time of a farmer per kilogram of coffee is between 3 to 5 hours. That makes coffee a quite expensive product in terms of labour time. Feel free to make the calculations of what that would cost you in your own currency. I use about 7g of coffee for a cup.
I think this is getting into notions of super-exploitation. Paul has done several videos on what's termed "Unequal Exchange", but I'm afraid I still don't have a good grasp of the topic. Is the labor of coffee-growers in peripheral countries under-priced due to national oppression? I'm curious what arguments could be made for this industry specifically.
But to assume 90 sec as a production time is something misleading. The coffee shop is not a production line and there is a lot of time spent on the cleaning, fixing, and doing things. In addition to that, how about the idle time. Better way to calculate the human labor in this would be to assume average number of employees days and the average quantity of daily orders/cups.
That’s a good question. Lower management that often also performs some of the same tasks that the workers they manage do might be considered so, insofar as they are part of the same workforce. But I think it’s safe to say that middle and upper management are unproductive. Even from a capitalist standpoint, they count as overhead. Many also make salaries that meet or exceed the full value of their labor, and so in that instance are a type of exploiter.
@@lrgroene I work in a pet store as a supervisor (about the lowest rung of management) and wouldn't want to be a Store Manager or even Deputy. I earn almost as much on hourly pay as they do and they're working 10hrs+ more than me without OT pay.
people who speak about rent probably mean also the cost of franchise and goodwill and such. The margins for most coffee shops are slim actually even though exploitation rate may be high. I mean if you show these numbers to baristas they won't be impressed unless they are studying econ
The margins are probably slim because most of the surplus value is going towards the landlord as rent. Let's say, generously, there is only £2.00 of surplus value made per cup of coffee. Let's say rent on the building is £4,000/month (not out of the question for a trendy spot in a major city). An establishment would need to sell 2000 cups per month just to pay the rent. That's >66 cups per day. If open 8 hours per day, that's 8.25 cups per hour. If each cup requires 90 seconds of labor + 30 seconds of transaction time, that puts a hard limit on 30 cups per hour (assuming one register, and the store being constantly packed with customers). The other issue is that Starbucks workers are not paid to produce a steady stream of cups of coffee. If that were the case, then a Starbucks worker would be producing £127.60 of surplus value per hour. But if the Starbucks worker only happens to spend 90 seconds in one particular hour making one cup of coffee, because only one customer came in during that hour, then that employee is only generating £3.19 surplus value in that hour...and probably getting paid way more than that to do building upkeep, stand around, scroll on their phone, or do make-work during the rest of the hour. In other words, during that one hour, it is the employee that is actually "exploiting" the business. But of course, that more than evens-out when the store gets busy. Basically, what this shows is that producing commodities to-order is a really inefficient way to run a business.
I have a potentially stupid question, but assuming that someone who stocks shelves and passes produce from the shelves to the customers (ensuring, for example, that stock is correctly rotated, and that, by whatever means, each "customer" takes whatever stock they are "meant" to take, and so on) constitutes "unproductive labour" (where, say, automated systems haven't been implemented to replace those systems), are people who take part in that system "working class" or "proletarian", or not, and, if they are and assuming they are "non-productive", how do they fit into socialist/communist models of distribution? Assuming the existence of some form of distribution centre (whether that be a centralised "store" or a somewhat decentralised "shop", where produce comes from outside of the immediate area), that isn't wholly mechanised and automated, i.e. that it requires human effort to maintain and regulate stock, how are the people who perform those tasks compensated? They perform *some* work, albeit not *productive*, but it's *work* nonetheless
They are not made with the same amount of labour. The Macdonalds machines are less labour intensive, automating more of the steps. The automatic machinery produces an inferior use value.
@@paulcockshott8733 Simply not true. Even so, they are not put out on the market to compete as commodities. If they were, Starbucks would fail and McDonalds would take over.
@@Ocinneade345 yes! It’s just a matter of observing the productive process of the starbucks worker. There’s much more physical and manual labour involved to the point the guy will write down some cute stuff on your cup. The MCD machine will just not do that
I was just thinking about how much I disagree with Dan Evans take on them being PB. His book is really good, but with lazy conclusions and contradictory ones.
Whenever I've heard the argument "this and that kind of wage worker are not actually proletarians" from people who call themselves Marxists, in the end it always boiled down to attempts to justify a meritocracy of some kind. For instance, the official position of our local Marxist reading/debate club is that only workers that create surplus value are considered proletariat, so the "dictatorship of the proletariat" only involves this subgroup of the working class, and everyone else shouldn't get to participate in politics or any other social matters after a social revolution. The explanation is a bit vague - allegedly, any profession that doesn't involve material production of some kind, inherently produces bourgeois class consciousness, so those people are dangerous as potential counter-revolutionaries. IMHO that's incredibly stupid, but what do I know...
A lot of the people saying this are twitter reactionaries playing at being Marxists who often themselves wouldn't fit into the role of a "proletarian" by their own definition. These are the same people who will use terms like "lumpen" as though it's some sort of slur or something. I'm not going to get into which people I'm talking about because they don't deserve anymore attention as their motivations have nothing to do about building socialism and everything to do with building culty little online cliques. No one should be learning Marxism from Twitch Streamers, the last people to be telling anyone what is or isn't productive.
That's a very concerning position to take, particularly given the reputation Communists have been branded with for "rounding people up", etc. I work in retail and could potentially be regarded as "unproductive" labor (although I beg to differ).
The cashiers example seems the most suspect, but at the same time I also think what it implies is pretty funny. So are cashier closer to being "living" constant capital then with capital accumulation? I mean, there is automated checkout now and a lot of them got let go. Man retail work sure is dehumanizing.
The way I imagine it is this. If you deleted them, would it physically impact the commodity turning into someone's use value? a cashier in that way is as productive as a landlord or a toll booth. It's not a moral judgement, you gotta do what you gotta do, it just doesn't actually physically produce anything.
@@novinceinhosic3531 “Necessary” does not mean “productive”. The question is not “could the business run without it”, it’s “does the work contribute to surplus value”.
@@novinceinhosic3531 I’m not sure exactly what you’re objecting too but Marx definitely used the terms “faux frais”, “revenue”, and “constant capital”.
@@novinceinhosic3531 “Now as before neither the time of purchase nor of sale creates any value. The function of merchant’s capital gives rise to an illusion. But without going into this at length here this much is plain from the start: If by a division of labour a function, *unproductive in itself although a necessary element of reproduction*, is transformed from an incidental occupation of many into an exclusive occupation of a few, into their special business, *the nature of this function itself is not changed*.” Vol. II Ch. 6
david graeber and his colleagues make this point in their work. they say that to understand things better for organizing we should start with "play". playing is doing something for its own sake. one step up from that is care. care is something you do so that someone else can play. education, childcare, housework, doctoring, etc. then there is the work that supports care work. you can't enjoy a glass of wine (play) if the cup wasn't washed (care) and you can't wash the cup if the cup was never made. the language of marx with primary, secondary, and tertiary industries is good but not in all contexts. this idea of refocusing on care is helpful for both critiqueing capitalism (there is an abundance of people willing to do care but a shortage of money available to pay them) and also for introducing the idea of a plan (many public services already plan the production of care). it also makes clear the huge gains in socialist experiments. the care work was greatly expanded in almost every single socialist experiment. the remaining planned economies like Cuba maintain huge care apparatuses. not to mention that it prevents all of this tedious arguing over what counts as productive or unproductive. it's obvious what work is care work, what work simply serves to restrict access to care, and what work is "bullshit".
Productive is not a moral category in the terms of Marxist economics. Productive labor can be morally apprehensible, unproductive labor can be virtuous. Marxist economics is not about morals per se. Productive in this sense merely relates to the question whether an (exchange) value is created (e.g.: factory worker), or whether the job is needed to realize value that already exists (e.g.: cashier).
@@DrynSarcastic360I agree, productive labor should not be mixed up with moral assessments of different types of goods and services. For example, I think Marx argued that tobacco production is technically productive, even though its product is really just a type of poison. I would only disagree that the defining thing is whether an exchange value is produced. The important thing should be whether or not a use-value was produced, and if this use value goes towards consumption by either workers or means of production. If we define it according to exchange value, we risk getting lost in commodity fetishism and making production dependent on exchange.
@@DrynSarcastic360 i'm aware. but for organizing the masses and propaganda it is not helpful. western culture puts moral judgements onto concepts like productivity.
Problem with this is which humans needs, the rich, the poor, all of them? I think we need a class based approach to the productive labour question, after all Smiths definition was an attack on aristocracy, socialists should make their definition an attack on capitalists, so workers producing luxury products become unproductive from the standpoint of socialism. It always amazes me that Marx took Smiths attack on the aristocracy as a given but then didn't think to apply the same logic to the capitalist.
around 6:50... the cashiers... bringing a produce from one place to the other and making it sellable - selling it at a specific place in a specific form - they belong to the production-value realization process. one could see them as a cost but so is every form of labor.
That is true for the transport workers who deliver the products to the store, and also for the stockers who arrange the shelves, and if the store has a restaurant or butcher, those workers are also productive. But cashier work is generally separate from all of this, and is focused specifically on sales. Now, in many stores, especially smaller ones, you’ll have the same workers performing these jobs in turn so that might complicate things. But the use-values you mention are provided by different categories of work than what cashiers do. The important thing is that sales are not necessary for getting products to consumers, but use-values like transport and shelf-stocking are.
@@lrgroene the cashier is the worker who oversees the realisation of the value in the commodity. from the pov of the capitalist society it is a useful, a neccesary, a productive activity..
@@kamilaneonschwarz5371well yes, from the capitalist perspective they are necessary. But the point is that from the standpoint of use-value production-without which capitalism couldn’t exist-they are not necessary and do not contribute added value
@@lrgroene within capitalism they are necessary, if you dont employ the cashiers and securities your goods wont even be commodities as the exchange value wont realize, just things would be taken. this use-value pov means to imagine a transition away from capitalism but it confuses the clarification how capitalism works. there are other moments in capitalist production which may be difficult to call productive labor. what is when the products the worker produced wont sell? their labor wasnt productive for the employer.
@@kamilaneonschwarz5371 All branches of labor in a firm are "necessary" for the capitalist to fully realize the value of the product, but not all of these labor branches contribute to the value of the product. Managers are necessary for coordinating the employees of a firm, but are non-productive as their labor only serves to direct productive employees. There is no way to extract surplus value from managers, but managers make sure surplus value extraction is coordinated and organized. For example, you could fire all managers at a Starbucks but the objective value of the coffee (Constant Capital of beans, espresso machines, etc. + Variable Capital of the barista assembling the latte) would not change. The objective value of a product (C+V) only accounts for the direct labor-time inputs - labor required to produce the machines & material, the machines that impart a fraction of their objective value, and labor required to assemble the final product. Here we see cashiers are completely irrelevant to the objective value of the product; a customer could purchase a candy bar from either a vending machine or a cashier, and there would be no difference in the amount of C+V it took to produce that candy bar, regardless of how the capitalist brought the candy bar to market.
This analysis really shows that people are dumb for buying coffee regularly at these sorts of establishments. Someone could instead "employ" themselves at making their own coffee at home and effectively make £127.60 per hour (£3.19 per 90 seconds of making a cup of coffee) during those 90 seconds it takes to make a cup of coffee. Even if specialized machinery cost hundreds of pounds, saving just £3.19 per day on one cup of coffee being self-made would easily save up for the machinery within a year.
The aesthetic. And not just the aesthetic of having a person serve you, but the preparation by another person, and the perceived value that provides. "Handmade" People have oddities when it comes to how they determine quality and value.
Coffe vending machine would only increase productivity they do not cut labor cost, you will still need a security guard and a technician to repair them/ handle clients who don’t know how to use it, like it is the case with automatic cash replacing cashiers. The capitalist would either have a less competitive bar or the cost would not outweigh the gain in productivity.
@@Multirightguy I think they'd be like the opera singer whose performance is recorded and sold, so productive. The coffee cup still exists, and wouldn't had it not been for the work of the barista. It's still traded, unlike the coffee cup made by a maid hired by a household. (I think in Marxian terms that's when use-value is connected to exchange-value.) There's a quantifiable surplus value from the barista's labour that's appropriated by the capitalist who owns the coffee house. What you seem to be implying, if I understand correctly, is that the "ceiling" for the value of a commodity is the cheapest process whereby it can be produced, and that any labour done above that common denominator is by definition unproductive. Is that a thing, in Marxism or in economic analysis?
It's called a coffee vending machine? But the coffee served by them is not as good? So coffee in a live coffee shop wis a venue for a higher-end commodity?
Perhaps I am missing something.. but why does it matter to people so much whether barristas are productive or unproductive according to X persons labels?
It's a quick video made by Prof Cockshott in probably an hour or two. It doesn't matter but it helps educate people on what these terms mean in relation to classical economics. The terms of productive or unproductive labor are part of a bigger argument that Marx makes in Capital Volume 2 that I cannot summarize in a TH-cam comment. Ultimately for daily life it doesn't matter, of course.
Thanks - I meant it more as in why are people on twitter getting so heated on the topic.. I appreciate the video but was confused with why it's a point of debate
The communist project is ultimately about overthrowing those who live off the labor of others, and liberating the productive forces from the parasitical influence of unproductive labor. So categorizing certain types of work as productive or unproductive has implications for the future, assuming a socialist transformation. Its certainly wrong to exclude proletarians in the unproductive sectors, or to cast it as some moral failing. But since unproductive labor drains the amount of use-values available to the producers, the proletariat has an interest in reducing as much as possible unproductive sectors.
@@lrgroeneoh okay! That makes sense thank you! I think what you described there was something that I have been thinking off but couldn't verbalise about my own country (UK).. we are so unproductive because the majority of the jobs (and "GDP") are unproductive roles like finance, sales, etc..
@@emrebennett7572Yes, indeed. And that’s a deliberate response to the problem of falling profit rates. Since growth in developed countries like the UK is constrained by the lower birth rates associated with higher living standards, the only way to keep profit rates up is to artificially restrict production. Hence the tremendous growth of the sectors you mentioned. That’s the meaning behind what Marx said about capitalism being a fetter on production, and the task of the communist proletariat being to liberate the productive forces in the interest of society.
90 sec to prepare a coffee? Ok, but should we not take the time interval between 2 subsequent customers in stead? (There's a factor of 2 - 5 difference that it could make to the final exploitation ratio)
The downtime for a barista would be variable between locations and hours worked but ~1200% is likely not far off for a part-time barista that works peak hours. I don't typically go to Starbucks but having an average of 90 seconds downtime between customers would be horrible for most fast-food places. (factor of 2). After some rigorous academic research (google searches and guesstimating). I found that supposedly the average Starbucks sells ~600 coffees per day, is open for ~14 hours, and has ~2 baristas staffed at a single time. This gives us 168 seconds per coffee produced for an individual barista and ~%700 rate of exploitation based on the value added and wages provided in this video.
I think the analysis is a bit flawed. Bottled coffees mass produced, for example, are commodities (they can be forwarded in additional processes of circulation etc); but when it comes to Starbucks, it's a personalized cup of coffee, so an immediate use-value, for one customer, for immediate consumption. According to Marx, this is not commodity production, but simply food service. Thus the worker here, the Starbucks barista, would be unproductive.
How's that different from a baker making loaves of bread? I think if there's a transformation involved - one doesn't eat coffee beans and milk separately, just as one doesn't eat wheat flour, water and yeast - that involves human labour, then the resulting commodity, if it's sold (to exclude coffee made privately by a hired maid), surplus value is generated and appropriated, so we can say production took place. But I wonder what to say of work that involves only, say, heating a premade meal up to serve it. I would still say that insofar as we don't dive our teeth into frozen food, catering as a whole is productive. I'll also add that I think "unproductive labour" may still be important. Administrative staff in a factory count their labour towards the final products put out by the factory even though they aren't on the factory floor. Doctors and teachers don't make things, so are by definition unproductive, but still essential to the reproduction of society, if I understand it right. I think in Marxian terms the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is that the former supports itself and the latter: in a socialist society, part of the labour from the productive sector goes to support the labour of the unproductive sector. So the question may be, rather than whether baristas do productive work or not, whether their labour is needed. But I don't think Marxism makes utilitarian judgements a priori. In a socialist society, communities may decide that coffee cups must be made in the most efficient way possible - by machines - or that they want them made by a human and served on a table in a pleasant coffee house.
I recommend reading Paul’s paper “Hunting Productive Work” where he gives a more robust and up to date version of Marx’s argument. The criterion of vendible commodity persisting in time is problematic. I doubt many would question whether corn farming is productive, but an ear of corn has a definite shelf life that a cruise ship or a train do not. Persistence through time is relative, and also ignores how services can be productive. Categorizing productive work by its relationship to the factors of production (labor and real capital) gets beyond this issue in my opinion.
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I never understood how a worker's production of a service could be argued as unproductive just because it does not create a physical commodity that remains after the work is done
Producing a service surely maintains the same amount of value as an equally productive creation of a tangible product, as it took the worker's workforce to create both and neither would exist without it
Service workers are not “equally productive.” A service is used up in the very instant of its performance and does not realise itself in any particular subject or vendable commodity which, if necessary, can put into motion a quantity of labour equal to that which had originally produced it, reimbursing its employer. It does not “maintain” anything.
Their service, however socially necessary, is unproductive of any value, it produces nothing for which an equal quantity of service can afterwards be procured.
Service work does not grow capital, service labour is itself, however useful, a running expense of the enterprise.
funny to see someone like cockshott respond to leftist twitter discourse
that said, the analysis is very good, hope to see more stuff like this in the future
You know what'd be a good topic for a future video? Something on Lysenko/Lysenkoism. I read the chapter on it in Dialectical Biologist recently and I think it'd be a good thing for someone knowledgeable to expand on.
Thank you Dr. Cockshott.
Rosa Luxemburg: From this point of view, the music-hall dancer whose legs sweep profit into her employer’s pocket is a productive worker, whereas all the toil of the proletarian women and mothers in the four walls of their homes is considered unproductive. This sounds brutal and insane, but corresponds exactly to the brutality and insanity of our present capitalist economy. And seeing this brutal reality clearly and sharply is the proletarian woman’s first task.
Should the state pay you for cleaning after your own children? 🤣🤣🤣
@@lukebruce5234 do you think the continued maintenance of social wellbeing is not valuable to a society? do you not think that is, in effect, what child tax benefits are?
@@lukebruce5234 of course, child benefits were extremly high in socialist countries. In socialist Czechoslovakia it would reach 1/3 of your salary and families with disabled children were given even greater compenzation as high as a standart salary if the child was severly disabled or suffered from bad illnes, not even talking about all the free child care which was avaible to everybody
@@bumam6665 In CSSR only the women taking care of children under the age of 2 were given child benefits. In 1982 it was 600 crowns for one child and 900 for two and that was only for the women who left work or school. Then there was of course maternity leave on top of that but I don't think we should view that as child benefits. The average salary in 82 was 2765. Not quite 1/3rd salary.
By the way I don't know if you know this but all female professions were heavily underpayed in CSSR.
The average salary in 1989 was 3100 but a nurse would make just 1600 🤣🤣🤣
A miner made 5800, a soldier 5000. A construction welder 4800. But an elementary school teacher made 1850. 😂😂😂
Yeah it was a pretty red pilled society. Women were kind of forced to marry men to even have enough money to survive.
Probably not the answer you wanted to hear brother but it is what it is. 🤯
@@lukebruce5234 Dear friend, You are focusing only on the direct child benefits, money given on hand-cash(for which you forgot to add the money you would get immidietly after birth which makes few hunderds in addition). Maternity leave is of course a child benefit as well as free kindergarde etc. But what you are forgeting is the insane deduction from tax(if you had three children it would be 50% write of just like that every month) plus interest free loans and extremly cheap housing for new families. We also have to count that for every child the mother would go sooner to pension. All this probably makes more than 1/3 of income. Today in czech republick the only benefit you get is the "early" pension leave(they are moving the pensione year further and further. I as a young person will not be able to leave for pension if we dont do socialist revolution) and tax write off which comes to around 17% of average salary(if you have three children).
"female profesions" - ČSSr saw massive rise in female employment acrooss all fields, its true that the positions you have presented here have been paid less than average but not by the margin you present here. I have a official statistical years book(it goes upto 1983 and stats presented will be from 1983) and in it I read average wage paid without JZD 2789 Kčs; agriculture 2790 Kčs; industry 2921 Kčs; construction 3106 Kčs; reaserch and science 3178 Kčs; education 2606 Kčs; medicine 2602(i know this clumbs up both doctors and nurses together but the shere number of nurses statistically outperforms the doctors. Your exmaples are either way off(please tell me your source) or dont represent the trutf. I would bet that the miner is probably mining in uranium mines where there was extra pay due to the hazardouse conditions etc. And i found that nurses would make 2955 Kčs in 1988 with average being 3095 Ksč(www.penize.cz/mzda-a-plat/238337-male-penize-mzdy-za-komunismu-a-dnes-zbohatli-jsme-skoro-vsichni!#inflace-vypocet). So your argument is just wrong.
Red pilled society? I see so you are rotted muricamud probably. Here in Czechoslovakia it wasnt no redpilled society, it was a socialist society in which worker could buy a flat or family house and have extra property for recreation in wildrness, three kids, car and a dog + paid leave in free reacreational centres. It was society where women were reaching the highest positions in production and were actually compenzeted for their pregnancy. Your attempt to smere my homeland falls short when faced with the smallest amount of actually data.
You might want to do a video summarizing your definition of productive labor in your paper “Hunting Productive Work.” The Smithian definition can get confusing, and I think you were spot on in defining productive work by its relationship to the real wage fund. As you said, services like food preparation are certainly productive so long as they are producing for the common market (where workers make purchases with wages). The fundamental factors of production are the workforce and the means of production. The question as to whether a product or service is productive is whether it goes into one of these two factors, or else it is extraneous to them and therefore unproductive. The proletariat are the main productive force of society, so their real wage is the measure of whether labor is used productively. I would argue that this is the case for education as well (and not just industrial training). A history class in an elite university is unproductive not because history education is unproductive, but because in this case it is a luxury service that doesn’t enter the real wage. But history courses made free online, or provided in community colleges is arguably productive (the product taking the form of information.) I would argue that this the same thing for entertainment, sporting goods, etc. If it’s produced for the workers market, it is productive, if it’s priced out of it, it is not.
I think these conversations are important, because one of the goals of communism has been the socialization of domestic labor. Domestic labor has wrongly been ignored or treated as unproductive, but of course the domestic economy is largely what feeds, cares for and reproduces the workforce. Socializing this sector through public restaurants, laundries, day cares and hairdressers is key to eliminating patriarchal exploitation as well as saving on labor time in providing these services to the associated producers.
I agree but it's a shame you didn't include this quotation from Capital Vol 1: "If we may take an example from outside the sphere of material production, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to be labouring the heads of his pupils, he works himself into the ground to enrich the owner of the school. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, makes no difference to the relation"
Also heating milk to 100C will scauld it and ruin the coffee! Source: ex-barista haha
I am splitting stuff up. I will compare his example with modern conditions. The role of teaching brings out deeper issues.
@@paulcockshott8733 Fair enough! Also thank you for your work explaining marxian economics in practice on TH-cam. It's surprisingly rare to find a channel that does that.
Thank you professor this debate is infuriating. All we needed was for someone to do the reading!
Its seems to me like an attempt to say unproductive workers cannot be exploited therefore theyre not a part of working class. That is not a useful stance to have if you wanna build class consciousness in society, quite the opposite
It’s true that we shouldn’t shun organizing workers in the unproductive sectors. Just arguing strategically, there’s some value in having the power to shut down the country clubs and luxury shops of the capitalists to hit them where it hurts. But the reason why we have to make the distinction is because, as communists, we want to eliminate income based on the exploitation of others labor. Unproductive labor drains the productive sector of labor and resources, and reduces the overall wealth available to society. For that reason, we have to consider organizing all workers with an eye to establishing an economy that uses labor to provide goods and services for society as a whole, instead of wasting labor on the wealthy few
"unproductive" only means the labor they produce isn't generative of surplus value, all the value of their labor is consumed at the point of its performance; ie, it doesn't make the capitalist richer, it makes them poorer as pure consumption (like the way we spend money or time to maintain ourselves)
According to the definitions presented here not all workers are exploited. Not in the capitalistic sense. You could argue that any worker that is paid less than the value of their labour is exploited but that is a pre-capitalist relationship. For capitalistic exploitation to occur it has to be in A. the production of a physical good, B. the production of goods in Department I (production of means of production) or Department IIa (necessities). Workers involved in the production of luxury goods like military arms or pet clothing are not being exploited because their pay comes out of the surplus already generated by living labour in I+IIa and therefore the labour of the luxury sector worker is constrained to never generating new wealth. It does not harm class consciousness to know this rather improves it because for example in Britain, the government advances plans called “levelling-up schemes” which look to push workers into so-called “high-wage, high-skill work” which involves insurance, marketing, and equity. Why should workers accept their labour going into the unproductive services to help maintain the profits of the rich?
No it's because these people vote Democrat which made Haz angry so he calls them unproductive.
I wanted to comment on how you accounted for the exploitation of a barista’s labor. I like that you commented on the depreciation of the equipment, although I think the added cost per cup would be slightly higher than a few p like you say. The machines used cost upwards of $150k and are used for a few years, but generally a coffee shop will have 2-3 such machines. On top of the initial cost there is also maintenance costs. As a barista I know that our machines have to be serviced minimum of once every week or two.
Aside from depreciation and maintenance of equipment, however, the most glaring discrepancy in the cost of labor that I notice in your calculation is the fact that it assumes baristas are making 1 flat white every 90 seconds for the entirety of their shift. This is not accurate. This discounts all labor performed other than the actual making of coffee. For every barista making a cup of coffee every 90 seconds there are 5-7 other workers in the coffee shop who aren’t actively making a flat white but are performing labor to support the making of the flat white: the worker taking the order, the worker performing the role of cashier, the worker cleaning dishes, the worker stocking the milk, cups, lids, coffee, etc. It is also worth noting that the barista who is making the flat white isn’t averaging 1 flat white every 90 seconds for the duration of their shift. There are times when there are no customers and so the barista is not performing labor that produces profit directly. Of course the barista is often still performing labor, but it is labor that isn’t accounted for in your assessment.
I bring this up because I have worked as a barista off and on for 8 years and have seen first hand what the actual cost of labor is for chains like Starbucks. Compared to other industries the cost of labor at Starbucks is quite low, but it isn’t as low as your calculations would have it seem.
To give an example: in the store where I currently work we average about 45 hours of labor in a 12 hour day. The average cost of labor is about $22.50/hr (yes, I live in the US). This comes out to about $1,012 in labor costs per day. Sales for my store will range between $2,500 and $4,500 depending on the day and a multitude of other factors with an average of about $3,200 per day. This means that labor accounts for about 31.6% of revenue.
These people demonstrate a clear lack of reading the essentials of marxism. Good video!
Thanks for this analysis. How does the price of maintaining the shop itself diffuse into the prices of the products made there? E.g. the cost of keeping the lights on in the room, the cost of running all the fridges all day, etc. - I'd assume those are also costs that must get priced into the cup of coffee as well.
Good question! I suspect the lighting cost would be comparable to the cost of boiling the water, since LED lights are very efficient and it takes a relatively high wattage heater to boil the water.
On shop repair, I have known the Costa in Glasgow central station for some 36 years, during which they have only refurbished it completely once. So the rate of wear and tear on the premises is comparatively low. I dont know how to estimate this since I dont have quotes for fitting out a cafe.
I have a question, so like authors when they write a book and sell it by mass producing them in idk some book making factory, apart from book that was written by the author how would you determine how much the author makes on each book sold? Because the author themselves doesnt write apart from when they initially wrote the book. And another question is things like marketing seen as productive labour? also one more question (last one I promise) how much does marketing have to do with the final value of a product so for example if a phone is manufactured and sold at 100$ but then through marketing the capitalist manages to sell the phone that was previously sold for 100$ for a new price of 1000$, does the value of labour put in change? and how so? If there are videos on this or any resources where I can learn more I would appreciate it
1) Book authors essentially get an intellectual property rent on the books sold, they indeed take no part on the actual production of the books that are actually sold yet take a portion of the profits.
2) Marketing is very interesting, because afaik Marx doesn't talk much about it and clearly it's become far more relevant for modern mass media capitalism than in his time. Marketing crucial for the actual practical realities of capitalist dynamics, as the selling of commodities necessitates consumer knowledge of said commodities. You could say that marketing is the production of information for market consumers, and this information is clearly material: flyers, ads, commercials, billboards, etc. literally have to be produced by labor employed by the capitalist. But it's curious because these products of labor are not sold as commodities, yet unlike unproductive labor they DO generate profit, indirectly, by increasing the consumer base, such that clearly the capitalist does obtain a net profit from investing in marketing. So it seems like there's this dimension of the actual implementation details of the capitalist form of production, that of information networks and influencing consumer choices, which is not well accounted for by classical economic theory.
3) I'm not terribly sure about this, i guess it would be easier to look at empirical data of commodity prices as a function of marketing expenditure. I'd say that marketing is an indirect constant capital cost that becomes necessary for production at larger volumes; in the same way that a larger volume of commodities cannot be sold without greater transportation expenditure to carry the goods to the market, so a larger volume of commodities cannot be sold without informing more customers of the commodity. See it the other way around and it makes more sense, without marketing, more commodities cannot in practical terms be produced without going unsold and not making any profit, so for all intents and purposes marketing "becomes" an overhead cost of production of commodities, which would be reflected in the final price. Of course whatever increase in price would have to be consistent with the labor actually put by the marketing workers in guaranteeing that the produced commodities are actually sold.
The only part of this analysis that I'd quibble about would be the fact that the worker is paid per hour, while the productivity would be per cup of coffee sold, so the exploitation ratio would depend on the amount of coffee made and sold in a shift.
It's still going to be quite a lot in any case.
Usually companies institute a “plan” mechanism. In days where the shop sold less than the “plan”, the employees get lower wages. This way the company saves up on wages.
If only American leftists learned to read… The answer is yes.
Marx, Capital: “The result, whether men or goods are transported, is a change in their whereabouts. Yarn, for instance, may now be in India instead of in England, where it was produced.
However, what the transportation industry sells is change of location. The useful effect is inseparably connected with the process of transportation, i.e., the productive process of the transport industry. Men and goods travel together with the means of transportation, and their traveling, this locomotion, constitutes the process of production effected by these means. The useful effect can be consumed only during this process of production. It does not exist as a utility different from this process, a use-thing which does not function as an article of commerce, does not circulate as a commodity, until after it has been produced. But the exchange-value of this useful effect is determined, like that of any other commodity, by the value of the elements of production (labour-power and means of production) consumed in it plus the surplus-value created by the surplus-labour of the labourers employed in transportation. This useful effect also entertains the very same relations to consumption that other commodities do. If it is consumed individually its value disappears during its consumption; if it is consumed productively so as to constitute by itself a stage in the production of the commodities being transported, its value is transferred as an additional value to the commodity itself.”
So because transport, an indispensable component of the process of production itself, is productive, that means that means that all services, even those entirely separate from the production of material goods, are productive. Fine logic.
Regarding the coffee beans themselves, it seems a rather odd assumption to make that the coffee is being bought at market price and therefore that this is its actual value. if this assumption held, the whole discussion would be moot, since wouldn't that also mean that the baristas are providing their labor at market value, and that the rest of the value is some X factor related to the experience of the coffee shop itself?
My assumption would have been to apply the LTV to all layers of the production process.
Another question then would be, if coffee is so cheap to make, why don't people just drink it at home?
I feel like the appeal of coffee shops is threefold: for the coffee addict, it's accessible in a rush, for people who want to meet, it's a sort of public space, especially in places that have a lack of free and safe public spaces, and finally, it's hip to drink coffee; it's a unique commodity that you can indulge in while also telling yourself and signalling to others that it's also for the benefit of your productivity. There's a certain "striver" image associated with it that I believe makes part of it conspicuous consumption.
If you don’t know LTV and its inherent theory of prices of production, refrain from making such ignorant comments
I have a query about cashiers. Though they aren't directly producing value, aren't they playing an important role in selling (or circulating commodities) and thus realizing surplus value generated by labour? Without them, wouldn't sales take a hit, which would affect the process negatively? So aren't they productive workers, in the sense that without them the productivity would take a hit? I understand that the role can be mechanized, but that is true for other more direct productive workers too.
The debate is about Marxist terms. In a Marxist sense, cashiers are unproductive. They merely realize the (exchange) value. The word unproductive does not mean they are useless or bad people. Of course you need people who help circulate the value. Marx uses this word merely to explain how the surplus extraction of value by capitalists works. The cashier can be necessary in commerce, just as much as the transporters or the financiers...but the question here is not about need. The question of productivity is simply about who produces the value. The circulation of value is the subject of the book Capital Volume 2, so a big part of this book is about jobs similar to cashiers such as merchants.
The core problem of the debate is that one side uses the word in a daily sense (productive = useful or profitable) while the other side uses the words as they are defined in classical economics. People are talking past each other.
The service that cashiers provide only goes towards facilitating exchange. A fundamental argument of the labor theory of value is that value cannot be created in exchange, only through production. Since the labor cashiers perform only facilitates exchange, no new values are produced. It does get tricky today though, because a lot of store clerks are also involved in support tasks relating to transport, storage, food prep and sanitation that arguably are productive. A grocery store is overall unproductive as a store, but arguably productive as a warehouse, and might also have a butcher, baker and deli dept. that would count as productive.
@DrynSarcastic360 right, and I have to preface it by saying I haven't read Capital volume 2. And I understand that cashiers aren't directly producing value. But if there being a cashier, more value is realized per day than if not, then isn't that cashier indirectly "producing" value? I also understand that value is only produced through labour, but can it be argued that the cashier performing their role requires labour, and since there being one or not makes a difference in sales, and thus profits and wages, that they are performing some indirect productive labour?
@@thatman3107 if you’re just thinking in terms of money making, cashiers play a vital role. But the Marxist argument about commodity fetishism is that the world of commodity exchange obscures and distorts the system of use-value production on which it is based. Exchange value needs use values, not the other way around. Money, sales, commodity exchange are not necessary for use-value production, they are dependent on it. Cashier labor is labor that goes into exchange, and is extraneous to actual use-value production. You might be on stronger ground arguing that they perform necessary activities of organizing storage and access to goods (these are concrete use-values, independent of exchange) but this is separate from cashier work proper, which refers simply to facilitating sales. Sales need products, but products do not need to be sold.
@lrgroene I get that by strict definition, a cashier isn't a productive labourer. But I think this definition misses out, or at least underestimates, on the role and importance of cashiers. Because if A is performing labour, and if because of that labour, more value is realized at the end of the day, then is A performing productive labour or not? Maybe if the direct productive workers stop working, there won't be anything for cashiers to sell, and so obviously, cashiers aren't the primary labourers. But to define them as unproductive workers seems to exclude their importance in the functioning of the system because of their labour.
Though I’m not sure I agree entirely, I do very much appreciate you producing this video. So thank you Paul.
I think the argument you’re missing is what’s being paid for is not actually the Starbucks coffee but the Starbucks experience which is performed by the Starbucks employees. Its muchnmore obviousnin some fancy restaurants which charge more because of the aesthetic or the scenery-the premium is not for the food itself but the experience of going to the establishment itself.
The example is from Costa one of three big chains and multiple small one operating in the UK. The Costa experience is no different from the Cafe Nero or Starbucks one. The prices of all these firms are similar. There is nothing special about any of them, there is a prevailing market price for Latte etc. if you look at the relative prices of expresso versus Latte they correlate with the extra labour to convert an expresso to a Latte. The relative prices are determined by their relative labour contents.
The widget is the coffee
@paulcockshott8733 The labour of a Barista, like other non-productive labour, has a certain value, regulated by the very same principles which regulate that of every other sort of labour: “relative prices are determined by relative labour content.” But, the value of barista labour, however useful it may be, perishes in the very instant of its performance, and does not realise itself in any particular vendable commodity for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured, irrespective of the labour time employed or the price of the service.
There are Costa machines in supermarkets (ASDA and Co-op) you operate yourself and take to the cashier to pay for. It grinds the coffee beans and serves it in a cup. You should explain how this doesn’t contradict labour value, given that a customer would not pay for the raw beans, water and cup separately for the same price. I think a follow-up video might be needed looking at the amount of contention in the comments.
Yes, part of what Costa/Starbucks employees are doing is acting as cashiers, which is unproductive. Did the 90 seconds to make a cup of coffee include ringing up the sale? If not, then the rate of surplus value on the actual making of the coffee would not be quite so high (but probably still very high). Let's say each cup of coffee required 30 seconds of cashier time. Then £3.19 in surplus value per cup of coffee would become £2.39 per cup. Still very high, though.
No that is just the making of the cup, usually a different worker rings up the sale.
@@Comradez I'm talking about Costa-branded vending machines that automatically create the cup of coffee.
About transportation and driving, if a HGV is operated by a worker transporting commodities between firms, does his labour count as productive?
Obviously it’s a necessary part of the industrial process to have goods like our aforementioned coffee beans delivered en masse, the driver would be doing something that is labour intensive while also perishable; but does his labour actually add any value to the goods he delivers? It seems like the answer would be no since the labour-content was fixed in the commodities by the workers whom made them. However the truck, the fuel which it runs, any toll fees, would all count as constant capital for the owning firm, and the driver’s wages as variable capital which I assume would be contained within the price of the commodity before sale?
A company driver has his wages exchange against capital stock since the lorry counts as company property whether he is employed by the firm or subcontracted by another firm. Would this, plus value-added in the price of the commodity, be enough to satisfy Smith’s definitions?
Also, his labour is necessary to the realisation of surplus-value in some way because without him how would firms guarantee commodities that are sold for money actually get delivered? Before the Industrial owners have money to spend on luxuries they need to have revenue from sale to divvy up. There would be no revenue for firms if it was all empty promises instead of real goods deliveries. I suppose my question is does he increase surplus-value, and if so how? Does he do it by time-saving in the total production process by operating lorries as productive machinery, so there is an increase in relative surplus-value?
Also would it differ if the driver was say transporting commodities like aluminium sheets between firms in Department I for making air freighters, or if he was transporting aluminium from Department I to Department IIb for making private jets? Would a Tesco driver delivering cabbages from farms to retail count as working-class within department IIa? Or between IIa and IIb being employed in IIb?
I want to clear my thoughts on this and perhaps it is just me, but it does seem a little convoluted and strange. Why is an increase in surplus-value, grown by a rise in the value fixed in commodities (including labour-power itself) by labour, the measure of productivity? I suppose it is restricted to capitalist relations of production, but under this definition a nurse that takes bloods, or measures the heart rate for a working-age patient would not count as productive. The entire sphere of domestic labour would not count as productive even though it makes human beings. It seems like it is not a definition worth persisting with beyond an analysis of capitalism.
Marxist economists all treat transport as productive
I don't dispute any of the points being made, though I suspect that growing coffee is a labour intensive process. I wonder how much labour time a kilogram of coffee contains. If both the coffee farmer, the many people involved with the processing and logistics of coffee beans, and then finally the barista, would all live in the labour token economy described i TANS, how many labour tokens would a coffee cup be? I suspect the market value for coffee beans doesn't reflect the labour content of the beans. I'll get back if I find out any numbers. Or if anybody knows more, please reply.
Not an expert by any means, but what you're saying is clear as day to anyone not from a western 1st world country. You're saying farmers in Kenya, Brazil, India etc. are exploited and paid pennies instead of dollars. Yes, they are.
To answer my own question, an optimistic estimation of the average labour time of a farmer per kilogram of coffee is between 3 to 5 hours. That makes coffee a quite expensive product in terms of labour time. Feel free to make the calculations of what that would cost you in your own currency. I use about 7g of coffee for a cup.
I think this is getting into notions of super-exploitation. Paul has done several videos on what's termed "Unequal Exchange", but I'm afraid I still don't have a good grasp of the topic. Is the labor of coffee-growers in peripheral countries under-priced due to national oppression? I'm curious what arguments could be made for this industry specifically.
But to assume 90 sec as a production time is something misleading. The coffee shop is not a production line and there is a lot of time spent on the cleaning, fixing, and doing things. In addition to that, how about the idle time.
Better way to calculate the human labor in this would be to assume average number of employees days and the average quantity of daily orders/cups.
Are the managers of the baristas productive?
That’s a good question. Lower management that often also performs some of the same tasks that the workers they manage do might be considered so, insofar as they are part of the same workforce. But I think it’s safe to say that middle and upper management are unproductive. Even from a capitalist standpoint, they count as overhead. Many also make salaries that meet or exceed the full value of their labor, and so in that instance are a type of exploiter.
@@lrgroene I work in a pet store as a supervisor (about the lowest rung of management) and wouldn't want to be a Store Manager or even Deputy. I earn almost as much on hourly pay as they do and they're working 10hrs+ more than me without OT pay.
@@PsilentMusicUKYes, but that doesn’t make the extra hours labor they do productive.
You are not counting marketing or rents for the shop that add costs
Those are part of the surplus value created by labour
@@paulcockshott8733 Thanks, I get the point. Also watched other video on surplus value.
Great video
As a barista and as Marxist I like this video.
How does Marx compensate people who don't produce anything? Super dumb
I thought ISTJ industrial state focus of productive
Point 7: 🔨Work, 🇨🇭health's insurance
people who speak about rent probably mean also the cost of franchise and goodwill and such. The margins for most coffee shops are slim actually even though exploitation rate may be high. I mean if you show these numbers to baristas they won't be impressed unless they are studying econ
The margins are probably slim because most of the surplus value is going towards the landlord as rent. Let's say, generously, there is only £2.00 of surplus value made per cup of coffee. Let's say rent on the building is £4,000/month (not out of the question for a trendy spot in a major city). An establishment would need to sell 2000 cups per month just to pay the rent. That's >66 cups per day. If open 8 hours per day, that's 8.25 cups per hour. If each cup requires 90 seconds of labor + 30 seconds of transaction time, that puts a hard limit on 30 cups per hour (assuming one register, and the store being constantly packed with customers).
The other issue is that Starbucks workers are not paid to produce a steady stream of cups of coffee. If that were the case, then a Starbucks worker would be producing £127.60 of surplus value per hour. But if the Starbucks worker only happens to spend 90 seconds in one particular hour making one cup of coffee, because only one customer came in during that hour, then that employee is only generating £3.19 surplus value in that hour...and probably getting paid way more than that to do building upkeep, stand around, scroll on their phone, or do make-work during the rest of the hour. In other words, during that one hour, it is the employee that is actually "exploiting" the business. But of course, that more than evens-out when the store gets busy.
Basically, what this shows is that producing commodities to-order is a really inefficient way to run a business.
The firms keep staffing levels down to the point where staff are all busy nearly all the time.
I have a potentially stupid question, but assuming that someone who stocks shelves and passes produce from the shelves to the customers (ensuring, for example, that stock is correctly rotated, and that, by whatever means, each "customer" takes whatever stock they are "meant" to take, and so on) constitutes "unproductive labour" (where, say, automated systems haven't been implemented to replace those systems), are people who take part in that system "working class" or "proletarian", or not, and, if they are and assuming they are "non-productive", how do they fit into socialist/communist models of distribution?
Assuming the existence of some form of distribution centre (whether that be a centralised "store" or a somewhat decentralised "shop", where produce comes from outside of the immediate area), that isn't wholly mechanised and automated, i.e. that it requires human effort to maintain and regulate stock, how are the people who perform those tasks compensated?
They perform *some* work, albeit not *productive*, but it's *work* nonetheless
You spelled barista wrong in the title
Why does a Starbucks coffee cost $7 but a Mcdonalds coffee $2? It's made with the same machinery
Probably what else is being sold plus quality and preparation.
They are not made with the same amount of labour. The Macdonalds machines are less labour intensive, automating more of the steps. The automatic machinery produces an inferior use value.
@@paulcockshott8733 Simply not true. Even so, they are not put out on the market to compete as commodities. If they were, Starbucks would fail and McDonalds would take over.
@@heroow37 have you worked at both? When I worked at Starbucks, and observed how McDonald’s made their coffees, McD’s was much less labor intensive
@@Ocinneade345 yes! It’s just a matter of observing the productive process of the starbucks worker. There’s much more physical and manual labour involved to the point the guy will write down some cute stuff on your cup. The MCD machine will just not do that
I was just thinking about how much I disagree with Dan Evans take on them being PB. His book is really good, but with lazy conclusions and contradictory ones.
Whenever I've heard the argument "this and that kind of wage worker are not actually proletarians" from people who call themselves Marxists, in the end it always boiled down to attempts to justify a meritocracy of some kind. For instance, the official position of our local Marxist reading/debate club is that only workers that create surplus value are considered proletariat, so the "dictatorship of the proletariat" only involves this subgroup of the working class, and everyone else shouldn't get to participate in politics or any other social matters after a social revolution. The explanation is a bit vague - allegedly, any profession that doesn't involve material production of some kind, inherently produces bourgeois class consciousness, so those people are dangerous as potential counter-revolutionaries. IMHO that's incredibly stupid, but what do I know...
A lot of the people saying this are twitter reactionaries playing at being Marxists who often themselves wouldn't fit into the role of a "proletarian" by their own definition. These are the same people who will use terms like "lumpen" as though it's some sort of slur or something. I'm not going to get into which people I'm talking about because they don't deserve anymore attention as their motivations have nothing to do about building socialism and everything to do with building culty little online cliques. No one should be learning Marxism from Twitch Streamers, the last people to be telling anyone what is or isn't productive.
That's a very concerning position to take, particularly given the reputation Communists have been branded with for "rounding people up", etc. I work in retail and could potentially be regarded as "unproductive" labor (although I beg to differ).
The cashiers example seems the most suspect, but at the same time I also think what it implies is pretty funny. So are cashier closer to being "living" constant capital then with capital accumulation? I mean, there is automated checkout now and a lot of them got let go. Man retail work sure is dehumanizing.
“Faux frais” along with incidental repairs etc. which I think in Marx’s bookkeeping would be a subtraction from revenue, not part of constant capital.
The way I imagine it is this. If you deleted them, would it physically impact the commodity turning into someone's use value? a cashier in that way is as productive as a landlord or a toll booth. It's not a moral judgement, you gotta do what you gotta do, it just doesn't actually physically produce anything.
@@novinceinhosic3531 “Necessary” does not mean “productive”. The question is not “could the business run without it”, it’s “does the work contribute to surplus value”.
@@novinceinhosic3531 I’m not sure exactly what you’re objecting too but Marx definitely used the terms “faux frais”, “revenue”, and “constant capital”.
@@novinceinhosic3531 “Now as before neither the time of purchase nor of sale creates any value. The function of merchant’s capital gives rise to an illusion. But without going into this at length here this much is plain from the start: If by a division of labour a function, *unproductive in itself although a necessary element of reproduction*, is transformed from an incidental occupation of many into an exclusive occupation of a few, into their special business, *the nature of this function itself is not changed*.” Vol. II Ch. 6
Honestly we need to redefine productivity in terms of human needs. What is productive work? The meeting of human needs is productive work.
david graeber and his colleagues make this point in their work.
they say that to understand things better for organizing we should start with "play".
playing is doing something for its own sake.
one step up from that is care. care is something you do so that someone else can play. education, childcare, housework, doctoring, etc.
then there is the work that supports care work. you can't enjoy a glass of wine (play) if the cup wasn't washed (care) and you can't wash the cup if the cup was never made.
the language of marx with primary, secondary, and tertiary industries is good but not in all contexts. this idea of refocusing on care is helpful for both critiqueing capitalism (there is an abundance of people willing to do care but a shortage of money available to pay them) and also for introducing the idea of a plan (many public services already plan the production of care).
it also makes clear the huge gains in socialist experiments. the care work was greatly expanded in almost every single socialist experiment. the remaining planned economies like Cuba maintain huge care apparatuses.
not to mention that it prevents all of this tedious arguing over what counts as productive or unproductive. it's obvious what work is care work, what work simply serves to restrict access to care, and what work is "bullshit".
Productive is not a moral category in the terms of Marxist economics. Productive labor can be morally apprehensible, unproductive labor can be virtuous. Marxist economics is not about morals per se. Productive in this sense merely relates to the question whether an (exchange) value is created (e.g.: factory worker), or whether the job is needed to realize value that already exists (e.g.: cashier).
@@DrynSarcastic360I agree, productive labor should not be mixed up with moral assessments of different types of goods and services. For example, I think Marx argued that tobacco production is technically productive, even though its product is really just a type of poison. I would only disagree that the defining thing is whether an exchange value is produced. The important thing should be whether or not a use-value was produced, and if this use value goes towards consumption by either workers or means of production. If we define it according to exchange value, we risk getting lost in commodity fetishism and making production dependent on exchange.
@@DrynSarcastic360 i'm aware. but for organizing the masses and propaganda it is not helpful. western culture puts moral judgements onto concepts like productivity.
Problem with this is which humans needs, the rich, the poor, all of them? I think we need a class based approach to the productive labour question, after all Smiths definition was an attack on aristocracy, socialists should make their definition an attack on capitalists, so workers producing luxury products become unproductive from the standpoint of socialism. It always amazes me that Marx took Smiths attack on the aristocracy as a given but then didn't think to apply the same logic to the capitalist.
FINALLY THE MOST BURNING QUESTION OF OUR TIMES IS BEING ANSWERED!!!!!
surprising such a point has to be made yet here we are ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
around 6:50... the cashiers...
bringing a produce from one place to the other and making it sellable - selling it at a specific place in a specific form - they belong to the production-value realization process. one could see them as a cost but so is every form of labor.
That is true for the transport workers who deliver the products to the store, and also for the stockers who arrange the shelves, and if the store has a restaurant or butcher, those workers are also productive. But cashier work is generally separate from all of this, and is focused specifically on sales. Now, in many stores, especially smaller ones, you’ll have the same workers performing these jobs in turn so that might complicate things. But the use-values you mention are provided by different categories of work than what cashiers do. The important thing is that sales are not necessary for getting products to consumers, but use-values like transport and shelf-stocking are.
@@lrgroene the cashier is the worker who oversees the realisation of the value in the commodity. from the pov of the capitalist society it is a useful, a neccesary, a productive activity..
@@kamilaneonschwarz5371well yes, from the capitalist perspective they are necessary. But the point is that from the standpoint of use-value production-without which capitalism couldn’t exist-they are not necessary and do not contribute added value
@@lrgroene within capitalism they are necessary, if you dont employ the cashiers and securities your goods wont even be commodities as the exchange value wont realize, just things would be taken. this use-value pov means to imagine a transition away from capitalism but it confuses the clarification how capitalism works. there are other moments in capitalist production which may be difficult to call productive labor. what is when the products the worker produced wont sell? their labor wasnt productive for the employer.
@@kamilaneonschwarz5371
All branches of labor in a firm are "necessary" for the capitalist to fully realize the value of the product, but not all of these labor branches contribute to the value of the product. Managers are necessary for coordinating the employees of a firm, but are non-productive as their labor only serves to direct productive employees. There is no way to extract surplus value from managers, but managers make sure surplus value extraction is coordinated and organized. For example, you could fire all managers at a Starbucks but the objective value of the coffee (Constant Capital of beans, espresso machines, etc. + Variable Capital of the barista assembling the latte) would not change. The objective value of a product (C+V) only accounts for the direct labor-time inputs - labor required to produce the machines & material, the machines that impart a fraction of their objective value, and labor required to assemble the final product. Here we see cashiers are completely irrelevant to the objective value of the product; a customer could purchase a candy bar from either a vending machine or a cashier, and there would be no difference in the amount of C+V it took to produce that candy bar, regardless of how the capitalist brought the candy bar to market.
This analysis really shows that people are dumb for buying coffee regularly at these sorts of establishments. Someone could instead "employ" themselves at making their own coffee at home and effectively make £127.60 per hour (£3.19 per 90 seconds of making a cup of coffee) during those 90 seconds it takes to make a cup of coffee. Even if specialized machinery cost hundreds of pounds, saving just £3.19 per day on one cup of coffee being self-made would easily save up for the machinery within a year.
Why are coffee shops not using vending machines to prepare the coffee? It seems implausible that for a large chain that would not be cheaper
The aesthetic.
And not just the aesthetic of having a person serve you, but the preparation by another person, and the perceived value that provides. "Handmade"
People have oddities when it comes to how they determine quality and value.
So in that way they are like "clowns and opera singers" and so not productive, at least according to Smith.@@SlickSimulacrum
Coffe vending machine would only increase productivity they do not cut labor cost, you will still need a security guard and a technician to repair them/ handle clients who don’t know how to use it, like it is the case with automatic cash replacing cashiers. The capitalist would either have a less competitive bar or the cost would not outweigh the gain in productivity.
@@Multirightguy I think they'd be like the opera singer whose performance is recorded and sold, so productive. The coffee cup still exists, and wouldn't had it not been for the work of the barista. It's still traded, unlike the coffee cup made by a maid hired by a household. (I think in Marxian terms that's when use-value is connected to exchange-value.) There's a quantifiable surplus value from the barista's labour that's appropriated by the capitalist who owns the coffee house. What you seem to be implying, if I understand correctly, is that the "ceiling" for the value of a commodity is the cheapest process whereby it can be produced, and that any labour done above that common denominator is by definition unproductive. Is that a thing, in Marxism or in economic analysis?
It's called a coffee vending machine? But the coffee served by them is not as good? So coffee in a live coffee shop wis a venue for a higher-end commodity?
Perhaps I am missing something.. but why does it matter to people so much whether barristas are productive or unproductive according to X persons labels?
It's a quick video made by Prof Cockshott in probably an hour or two. It doesn't matter but it helps educate people on what these terms mean in relation to classical economics. The terms of productive or unproductive labor are part of a bigger argument that Marx makes in Capital Volume 2 that I cannot summarize in a TH-cam comment. Ultimately for daily life it doesn't matter, of course.
Thanks - I meant it more as in why are people on twitter getting so heated on the topic.. I appreciate the video but was confused with why it's a point of debate
The communist project is ultimately about overthrowing those who live off the labor of others, and liberating the productive forces from the parasitical influence of unproductive labor. So categorizing certain types of work as productive or unproductive has implications for the future, assuming a socialist transformation. Its certainly wrong to exclude proletarians in the unproductive sectors, or to cast it as some moral failing. But since unproductive labor drains the amount of use-values available to the producers, the proletariat has an interest in reducing as much as possible unproductive sectors.
@@lrgroeneoh okay! That makes sense thank you!
I think what you described there was something that I have been thinking off but couldn't verbalise about my own country (UK).. we are so unproductive because the majority of the jobs (and "GDP") are unproductive roles like finance, sales, etc..
@@emrebennett7572Yes, indeed. And that’s a deliberate response to the problem of falling profit rates. Since growth in developed countries like the UK is constrained by the lower birth rates associated with higher living standards, the only way to keep profit rates up is to artificially restrict production. Hence the tremendous growth of the sectors you mentioned. That’s the meaning behind what Marx said about capitalism being a fetter on production, and the task of the communist proletariat being to liberate the productive forces in the interest of society.
90 sec to prepare a coffee? Ok, but should we not take the time interval between 2 subsequent customers in stead? (There's a factor of 2 - 5 difference that it could make to the final exploitation ratio)
The downtime for a barista would be variable between locations and hours worked but ~1200% is likely not far off for a part-time barista that works peak hours. I don't typically go to Starbucks but having an average of 90 seconds downtime between customers would be horrible for most fast-food places. (factor of 2).
After some rigorous academic research (google searches and guesstimating). I found that supposedly the average Starbucks sells ~600 coffees per day, is open for ~14 hours, and has ~2 baristas staffed at a single time. This gives us 168 seconds per coffee produced for an individual barista and ~%700 rate of exploitation based on the value added and wages provided in this video.
Haz BTFO
he is too busy culture warring to do any reading
He’s allergic to good faith debate
Haz is going to make a response to this, don't get too cocky
@@lysenkotheory3400 saying nonsense and shouting, as always.
Jesus, how can people think that guy is smart and not astroturfed ffs
The last people who have any legitimacy to speak on what is or isn't productive are twitch streamers and their terminally online fans.
I think the analysis is a bit flawed. Bottled coffees mass produced, for example, are commodities (they can be forwarded in additional processes of circulation etc); but when it comes to Starbucks, it's a personalized cup of coffee, so an immediate use-value, for one customer, for immediate consumption. According to Marx, this is not commodity production, but simply food service. Thus the worker here, the Starbucks barista, would be unproductive.
How's that different from a baker making loaves of bread? I think if there's a transformation involved - one doesn't eat coffee beans and milk separately, just as one doesn't eat wheat flour, water and yeast - that involves human labour, then the resulting commodity, if it's sold (to exclude coffee made privately by a hired maid), surplus value is generated and appropriated, so we can say production took place. But I wonder what to say of work that involves only, say, heating a premade meal up to serve it. I would still say that insofar as we don't dive our teeth into frozen food, catering as a whole is productive.
I'll also add that I think "unproductive labour" may still be important. Administrative staff in a factory count their labour towards the final products put out by the factory even though they aren't on the factory floor. Doctors and teachers don't make things, so are by definition unproductive, but still essential to the reproduction of society, if I understand it right. I think in Marxian terms the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is that the former supports itself and the latter: in a socialist society, part of the labour from the productive sector goes to support the labour of the unproductive sector.
So the question may be, rather than whether baristas do productive work or not, whether their labour is needed. But I don't think Marxism makes utilitarian judgements a priori. In a socialist society, communities may decide that coffee cups must be made in the most efficient way possible - by machines - or that they want them made by a human and served on a table in a pleasant coffee house.
I recommend reading Paul’s paper “Hunting Productive Work” where he gives a more robust and up to date version of Marx’s argument. The criterion of vendible commodity persisting in time is problematic. I doubt many would question whether corn farming is productive, but an ear of corn has a definite shelf life that a cruise ship or a train do not. Persistence through time is relative, and also ignores how services can be productive. Categorizing productive work by its relationship to the factors of production (labor and real capital) gets beyond this issue in my opinion.
Nah, multiple such chains exist and you can get an equivalent product from any of them, it's not bespoke, a flat white is a flat white.
Marx doesn't compensate for labor that doesn't produce product. Get out.
no, ty.
- someone who has never been a barista in their life.
I hadnt thought about it this way, thank you very much for educating me🫡