Contrary to what is said in the Theories, they imply that wage-earning commercial clerks or travellers do not perform productive labour, at least not from the standpoint of capital as a whole. However, even when this basic principle is established, four additional problems remain to be solved.

First, there is the question of so-called ‘immaterial goods’: concerts, circus acts, prostitution, teaching, etc. In Theories of Surplus-Value, Marx tends to classify these as commodities, in so far as they are produced by wage-earners for capitalist entrepreneurs. Although in Volume 2 he does not explicitly contradict this, he insists strongly and repeatedly on the correlation between use-values embodied in commodities through a labour process which acts upon and transforms nature, and the production of value and surplus-value.48 Moreover, he provides a general formula which implies the exclusion of wage-labour engaged in ‘personal service industries’ from the realm of productive labour: ‘If we have a function which, although in and for itself unproductive, is nevertheless a necessary moment of reproduction, then when this is transformed, through the division of labour, from the secondary activity of many into the exclusive activity of a few, into their special business, this does not change the character of the function itself. ‘49 If this is true of commercial travellers or book-keepers, it obviously applies all the more to teachers or cleaning services.

The definition of productive labour as commodity-producing labour, combining concrete and abstract labour (i.e. combining creation of use-values and production of exchange-values) logically excludes ‘non-material goods’ from the sphere of value production. Furthermore, this conclusion is intimately bound up with a basic thesis of Capital: production is, for humanity, the necessary mediation between nature and society; there can be no production without (concrete) labour, no concrete labour without appropriation and transformation of material objects.50

This becomes evident when Marx sets forth in Capital Volume 2 his reasons for classifying the transport industry in the realm of the production of value and surplus-value, rather than in that of circulation. The argument is clearly summarized in the following passage: ‘The quantity of products is not increased by their transport. The change in their natural properties that may be effected by transport is also, certain exceptions apart, not an intended useful effect, but rather an unavoidable evil. But the use-value of things is only realized in their consumption, and their consumption may make a change of location necessary, and thus, in addition, the additional production process of the transport industry. The productive capital invested in this industry thus adds value to the products transported.’51

Now it is obvious that none of these arguments is applicable to the carrying of persons. Passenger transport is not an indispensable condition of the realization of use-values and adds no new value to any commodity. It is rather a personal service on which individuals (whether capitalists or workers) spend their own revenue. Thus, whether it is organized on the basis of wage-labour or not, the passenger transport industry can no more be considered as increasing the total mass of social value and surplus-value than can wage-labour employed in the fields of commerce, banking or insurance.

In striking contrast to the above passage is Marx’s argument in Chapter 6, 3, of Volume 2. While explicitly stating that transportation of persons by capitalist enterprise does not create commodities or use-values of any kind, he notes that it is nevertheless a ‘productive branch’, even though the ‘useful effect’ (Nutzeffekt) is only consumable during the production process itself.52

Ranging this question under the broader heading of so-called service industries, we may say that, as a general rule, all forms of wage-labour which exteriorize themselves in and thus add value to a product (materials) are creative of surplus-value and hence productive for capitalism as a whole. This applies not only to manufacturing and mining industries, but also to transportation of goods,53 ‘public service’ industries such as the production and transport of water or any form of energy (e.g. gas and electricity), the selling of meals in restaurants, the building and sale of houses and offices as well as provision of the material for constructing them, and of course agriculture. Many sectors which are often included under the heading ‘service industries’ are, therefore, parts of material production and employ productive labour. By contrast, the letting of apartment or hotel rooms, the service of transporting persons in buses, underground systems or trains, the performance of medical, educational or recreational wage-labour which is not objectivized outside the worker (the sale of specific forms of labour rather than of commodities), the work of commercial or banking clerks and of the employees of insurance companies or market research firms – these do not add to the sum total of social value and surplus-value produced, and cannot therefore be categorized as forms of productive labour.

An interesting illustration is provided by television. The production of television sets or films (including copies of such films) is obviously a form of commodity production, and wage-labour engaged in it is productive labour. But the hiring-out of completed films or the renting of a single television set to successive customers does not have the characteristics of productive labour. Similarly, wage-labour employed in making advertising films is productive, whereas the cajoling of potential clients to purchase or order such films is as unproductive as the labour of commercial representatives in general.

The second problem is to draw a precise demarcation between the spheres of production and circulation in capitalist society as a whole. Volume 2 of Capital leaves no room for doubt about Marx’s view: only that labour which either adds to or is indispensable for the realization and conservation of a commodity’s use-value adds to the total amount of abstract social labour embodied in that commodity (is productive of value).54 Like the rest of Volume 2, the passages dealing with this question are but successive unfoldings of the basic analysis of the commodity – of its irreducible duality and the contradictions flowing therefrom.

Thirdly, we have to consider the different kinds of labour performed within the production process itself. Here Marx takes a much less simplistic attitude than some of his latter-day disciples. His fundamental doctrine is that of the ‘collective labourer’, as developed in ‘Results of the Immediate Process of Production’.55 Productive labour, as labour expended in the realm of production of commodities, is all wage-labour indispensable for that production process; that is to say, not only manual labour, but also that of engineers, people working in laboratories, overseers, and even managers and stock clerks, in so far as the physical production of a commodity would be impossible without that labour. But wage-labour which is indifferent to the specific use-value of a commodity and which is performed only to extort the maximum surplus-value from the work-force (e.g. the wage-labour of timekeepers) or to assure the defence of private property (security guards in and around a factory); labour linked to the particular social and juridical forms of capitalist production (lawyers employed as salaried staff by manufacturing firms); financial book-keepers; additional stock-checkers made necessary by the tendency to overproduction – none of these is productive labour for capital. It does not add value to the commodities produced (although it may be essential to the overall functioning of the capitalist system, or of bourgeois society as a whole).

The final case to be examined is that of petty commodity producers, independent peasants and handicraftsmen. While producing commodities and thus both use-values and exchange-values, these strata do not directly create surplus-value (except in marginal cases), although they may contribute indirectly to the mass of social surplus-value – for example, by depressing the value of food through their cheap labour. We believe that on this point Marx maintained the position put forward in Theories of Surplus– Value: such strata perform labour which is neither productive nor unproductive from the point of view of the capitalist mode of production, because they operate outside its framework.56

7.