Theorizing Academic Labour

Here's my take on this: academics in pure public sector institutions do not produce surplus value as they don't even produce for the market (the same applies to health workers and other public sector employees). But they are exploited (by the state) in the sense that they spend more time working than is socially necessary to produce the bundle of commodities required for their reproduction. The labor time they put in simply does not take the form of value and surplus-value, since their product does not take the form of a commodity.

Workers employed by commercial capital (e.g. in retail, insofar as it is involved purely in buying and selling – no transport & warehousing, as these are productive) are exploited in the same sense: their labor does not create value and surplus-value, but there is still the discrepancy between the amount of time they spend working and the amount of time represented by their wage. In this respect, their situation (that of academics as well as commercial workers) is different economically (in terms of their role in social reproduction) from the situation of workers employed by "industrial" capital (i.e. those who produce value & surplus-value), but I don't think it makes much of a political difference.

However, depending on how the funding mechanisms are set up, the work of academics may be a means of appropriating a part of the surplus, redistributed through the state, by the academic bureaucracy. In a sense, this is again similar to what commercial capital is doing: appropriating a part of the surplus value produced elsewhere, by industrial workers. For example, in some countries, institutions like universities are funded based on publication output (and other performance measures) of the employees. Hence there are pressures from the (various levels of) academic administration to increase performance so that a larger piece of the pie allocated by the state to education and research flows toward them. This something like an ersatz capitalism. Unlike capitalists, the academic bureaucracy is quite limited in what it can do with the funds thus acquired. It's not like they can take that money and invest it in a more profitable industry if the academia does not provide a reasonable rate of profit. And I guess the main motivation of the academic bureaucracy is the accumulation of prestige (and the power, perks and personal income that come with it), not of money for the sake of money. But it is clearly a means of extending the logic of competition and the market into an area where it had not existed before. I think some health care systems do this, too.

Finally, academics in a university run for profit produce value and surplus value for the capitalist who owns the enterprise:

Marx

If we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a schoolmaster is a productive labourer when, in addition to belabouring the heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation.

My take is pretty much the same as Jura's, although s/he put it far better than I can do.

Academia does not exist in a vacuum from the rest of society but often serves vested interests. Academic research is not value free so while maybe not as exploited as some other workers, academics may reinforce and perpetuate exploitation such as for example research in civil engineering being used by multinational corporations, maybe driving people from their land in big development projects in India for instance, research by chemists used by environmentally damaging corporations, research in the arts perpetuating structures in society such as ideas about proper and valuable culture that belongs to the middle classes, the superiority of Western ideas and cultures. All those examples are just off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many more and better.

Academics also teach and prepare young people for the world of work and while many are good and intelligent people with the best intentions you have to acknowledge that to a large extent further education is a machine for ensuring society continues as it is.

I know the first point was made in post 2 but I thought it was worth repeating.

No response received from OP. Abort, retry, ignore, fail?

cactus9

Academia does not exist in a vacuum from the rest of society but often serves vested interests. Academic research is not value free so while maybe not as exploited as some other workers, academics may reinforce and perpetuate exploitation such as for example research in civil engineering being used by multinational corporations, maybe driving people from their land in big development projects in India for instance, research by chemists used by environmentally damaging corporations, research in the arts perpetuating structures in society such as ideas about proper and valuable culture that belongs to the middle classes, the superiority of Western ideas and cultures. All those examples are just off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many more and better.

Academics also teach and prepare young people for the world of work and while many are good and intelligent people with the best intentions you have to acknowledge that to a large extent further education is a machine for ensuring society continues as it is.

So, before respond further here, I just want to clarify as it seems you're suggesting that the individuals involved in the academy bear some responsibility for the role the academy plays within capitalism. Is that correct?

Shazam

if academic labor doesn't produce surplus value as unproductive labor, then how is exploitation by the state accounted for? Does the state simply pay employees less than they deserve because the tax base is too low? How does that work exactly?

But the state does pay them what they deserve – remember they're selling labor power, and what they get in wages enables them to reproduce themselves. In return, they perform some functions the state views as necessary (or simply tolerable), and (depending on how the funding mechanism is set up) the more and the better they do it, the more money their institution gets (hence all institutions compete for more funding).

Why does the state care at all? Academic institutions provide training to high-skilled workers, they do research (some of which can be applied and turned into patents), and as cactus9 pointed out, they play an ideological role. I think there's also the question of international prestige, cultural influence (projecting an image of a cultured, highly developed country, which in turn attracts investment, high-skilled migrant labor, etc.). So it may be useful for the state to maintain even those departments which contribute little in terms of training or applied research. But it will want to keep an eye on what they're doing, so you get the funding mechanisms which tie money to academic productivity or which force departments to look for outside funding (from international institutions, private benefactors or enterprises). And of course struggles play a role; there are professors in marxist political economy in the US (Harry Cleaver being one of them) who got their positions in the 1970s as a result of student pressure to create such positions. But given that public sector academics are mostly funded by the state, i.e. they're ultimately paid out of surplus value redistributed through taxes, a responsible state will always be looking for opportunities for cuts or changes in the employment regime (precarity etc.).

The wages of academics must allow them to reproduce. They must also be somewhat competitive with wages for workers with similar skills in the private sector (but this only applies in the long term – it may take a long time before the state realizes that not enough people choosing a career in the academia is a bad thing; and depending on the national project the state is trying to implement, it may not even be a bad thing). Given that academic labor is not that easy to supervise, I guess there are people in the academia who aren't exploited – they don't put in more labor time (in concrete, useful labor) than they get back in wages (in abstract, social labor), or, in other words, if their concrete labor time counted as directly social, it wouldn't be less than what they get in money. These people got themselves an OK deal (although their consumption is still restricted by the wage, they're still living in capitalism and have to deal with a lot of shit, like the threat of austerity).

Chilli Sauce

cactus9

Academia does not exist in a vacuum from the rest of society but often serves vested interests. Academic research is not value free so while maybe not as exploited as some other workers, academics may reinforce and perpetuate exploitation such as for example research in civil engineering being used by multinational corporations, maybe driving people from their land in big development projects in India for instance, research by chemists used by environmentally damaging corporations, research in the arts perpetuating structures in society such as ideas about proper and valuable culture that belongs to the middle classes, the superiority of Western ideas and cultures. All those examples are just off the top of my head and I'm sure there are many more and better.

Academics also teach and prepare young people for the world of work and while many are good and intelligent people with the best intentions you have to acknowledge that to a large extent further education is a machine for ensuring society continues as it is.

So, before respond further here, I just want to clarify as it seems you're suggesting that the individuals involved in the academy bear some responsibility for the role the academy plays within capitalism. Is that correct?

Yeah some responsibility. Just like say someone working for Shell bears some responsibility. But probably less. I mean, I wouldn't work for Shell but I would work in academia. I don't think an individual having some responsibility for the fruits of their labour is particularly controversial but I'm willing to hear otherwise.

I would say that academic work in the humanities does produce value but it is not productive (of absolute surplus value). It might even be productive of relative surplus value for individual businesses (i.e. make a profit for private universities through teaching), but, from the perspective of the total social mass of value, it remains only a cost factor that must increasingly justify itself, in an age of crisis, in utilitarian terms (REF 'impact') and come under the logic of market competition as that mass shrinks. The working conditions are increasingly precarious and stressful as there are a surfeit of graduates and a dearth of positions due to cuts in funding (despite the massive increase in fees) and the extension of the retirement age meaning that academics have to retain their jobs for longer. I generally agree with the idea that it exists to produce high-skilled workers and that the research it produces is inherently ideological because it is largely aimed at influencing civil society and the state. That doesn't meant there aren't well intentioned people in it or that there isn't still a tiny margin of liberty of thought but academics are essentially character masks for capitalist social processes like any other role in society.

Edit: I also think that the expansion of the university system to half of school leavers was not some radically egalitarian drive by Labour but rather a way to artificially reduce unemployment figures and to shift the cost of training and unemployment onto workers and their children. It also created a lot of financial capital accumulation through financial transactions and debt speculation.

Yeah some good posts above. I think one point which is worth making is that even academics in pure state institutions are still involved in producing value to some extent as academic journals get content for free from academics and public sector institutions, then charge exorbitant amounts for people to be able to access them. So in that sense they are being exploited.

Also I'm not sure it's helpful to think about "exploitation" on an individual level, it's more about classes as a whole. In that the working class is exploited as a whole. I mean you get individual proletarians who may manage to produce less than it takes to reproduce them as workers, through laziness or incompetence (like this legend).

Also of course while some people work in the public sector and others the private sector we are all part of the same labour market, and so "exploited" workers in the private sector will earn roughly the same as perhaps "non-exploited" workers in the public sector producing the same amount of goods/services (so private schools/state schools will pay teachers relatively similar amounts, councils will pay builders comparable amounts to private building companies etc).

Steven.

Also I'm not sure it's helpful to think about "exploitation" on an individual level, it's more about classes as a whole. In that the working class is exploited as a whole. I mean you get individual proletarians who may manage to produce less than it takes to reproduce them as workers, through laziness or incompetence (like this legend).

I think the above is key but it's evidently incredible difficult to maintain the level of abstraction of most of "our" theory. I'm beginning to think it's a fatal flaw, or at least something that needs to be explained much better and/or constantly watch for and criticise.

Discussions *very* often, and perhaps understandably, end up applying theory at the wrong scale. The problem is that it's not without consequences.

Yeah some responsibility. Just like say someone working for Shell bears some responsibility. But probably less. I mean, I wouldn't work for Shell but I would work in academia. I don't think an individual having some responsibility for the fruits of their labour is particularly controversial but I'm willing to hear otherwise.

The problem is, though, and you've already hinted at it, all jobs either directly or indirectly produce and reproduce capitalism on a daily basis - and, if you look far enough, somehow prop up the superexploitative elements of global capitalism as well. So I don't think focusing on academic labor or Shell workers or whatever is particularly useful.

The exception may be jobs like cops that involve direct, conscious coercion of the working class.

Malva

I would say that academic work in the humanities does produce value but it is not productive (of absolute surplus value). It might even be productive of relative surplus value for individual businesses (i.e. make a profit for private universities through teaching), but, from the perspective of the total social mass of value, it remains only a cost factor that must increasingly justify itself, in an age of crisis, in utilitarian terms (REF 'impact') and come under the logic of market competition as that mass shrinks.

What do you mean by "absolute" and "relative" surplus value? (It does not seem to me that your usage corresponds to the usual one). Anyway, if academic work produces value, then it cannot be a mere "cost factor" from the total social point of view. It's either one or the other.

Steven.

Yeah some good posts above. I think one point which is worth making is that even academics in pure state institutions are still involved in producing value to some extent as academic journals get content for free from academics and public sector institutions, then charge exorbitant amounts for people to be able to access them. So in that sense they are being exploited.

Good point about academic publishers, but I think this is better viewed as rent. (The publishers – insofar as we're talking about online repositories of journals – have no control over the production process and they don't reinvest the profits to expand that process. They are completely parasitic on it.)

jura

Good point about academic publishers, but I think this is better viewed as rent. (The publishers – insofar as we're talking about online repositories of journals – have no control over the production process and they don't reinvest the profits to expand that process. They are completely parasitic on it.)

TBH I think we are getting into semantics at the moment. But if we are, then I would say that I disagree with this as they do produce and control the infrastructure of the journals, i.e. do the printing and distribution of the physical journals or build the websites and pay for the hosting of online journals etc. But like I said I don't think this is an important distinction…

@Jura. Sorry, you are right. I meant to say that it might not produce surplus value from the total social point of view but might do so for an individual business.

I'll have to think about the second bit!

Steven.

TBH I think we are getting into semantics at the moment. But if we are, then I would say that I disagree with this as they do produce and control the infrastructure of the journals, i.e. do the printing and distribution of the physical journals or build the websites and pay for the hosting of online journals etc. But like I said I don't think this is an important distinction…

OK, I had to think about this a bit more.

First of all, it is true that companies like Elsevier control the infrastructure. So they have control over the production process that builds and maintains that infrastructure (the system administrators, the marketing department, the journal acquisitions department etc., and loads of constant capital to store all that content etc.)

What they don't control is the production process that produces content for the journals – academic labor. They don't hire that labor (as you said, academics submit their content for free), they don't provide it with means of production (computers, lab equipment, offices), they can't enforce speedups or discipline, and they don't even have control over what content is selected for the journal (this is done by journal editors who also consult reviewers).

As regards the labor that produces the journals themselves (i.e., editing, layout, secretarial work etc.), at least in some cases this is done independently of these publishing companies (i.e., there's a separate entity, a public institution in my experience, which employs the journal staff some of whom are also academics themselves). Perhaps there are different cases (journals run by the staff hired directly by the publisher), but it's irrelevant to the present discussion as we're talking about academic labor.

So these companies are effectively middlemen. I'm on the fence as to whether they're commercial capitalists who buy cheap – in this case, in the extreme – and sell dear (the fact that they employ staff to lure in more journals and to advertise subscriptions to their services to institutions makes this interpretation attractive) or whether they're more akin to landowners in that they extract rent based on property claims (the attraction of this view stems from the fact that intellectual property is key for their functioning; scientific papers are non-reproducible use-values, similar in a way to works of art; the uniqueness of each is what allows these companies to charge so much, irrespective of the cost to produce them). In either case, the academics are not exploited by these companies. But in both cases, the labor of these academics does take the form of a commodity (the online paper) and they do produce value and surplus value, which is realized by these companies (though not produced by their capitals – just as in the case of merchants or landowners) either as commercial profit or as some form of monopoly rent.

Second, I don't think the distinction between rent and various forms of profit (commercial, industrial) is semantic. All are forms of surplus value, but the underlying social relations (including relations of power over someone else's labor) are different. The theory that there's a boss class and a working class, that the former exploits the latter, and that we should do away with this is good for campaigning but I think to have an understanding of what's going on we need a few more distinctions.

Surplus value cannot be produced for an individual business. The concept is inherently social, hence why Marx operates with categories like profit, rent, and interest.

Well, surely it makes sense to say that e.g. the activities performed in the corner shop down the road don't increase total surplus value because it is a commercial capital which only realizes surplus value produced elsewhere.

How is what I was describing not social? I was saying that not all forms of labour are productive of surplus value. They might help to realise it, as in Jura's example, or create the conditions for its creation, as in the example of an out-sourced cleaning company, or contribute to the reproduction of labour power, as in academia, but that does not mean they are 'productive' in the Marxian sense even if the businesses realise profits for themselves. I was saying that academia is a non-productive sector of the economy (even if it is in some way essential to it - like corner shops).

Malva, I think Khawaga was responding to me saying that the surplus value realized in the selling of scientific papers was not produced by the publishing companies' capital.

Steven.

Yeah some good posts above. I think one point which is worth making is that even academics in pure state institutions are still involved in producing value to some extent as academic journals get content for free from academics and public sector institutions, then charge exorbitant amounts for people to be able to access them. So in that sense they are being exploited.

Just to briefly comment on this from second-hand personal experience (a friend was tasked with getting an article published in a psychology journal).
Of course, this is anecdotal and I'm not familiar with the extent of the following practice, but here it goes. Not only is the content as you say free, but it is also possible for either researchers/academics or the institution to have to pay a journal for publishing a piece.

The logic of it seems a bit obscure to me, but I'd assume it is connected to the publication rankings imposed by state agencies and independent "quality" assessment agencies which are implicated in the ongoing restructuring of public institutions, be they primarily educational or primarily research-oriented.

Not only is the content as you say free, but it is also possible for either researchers/academics or the institution to have to pay a journal for publishing a piece.

I'm not sure about paying to get published but the new REF rules mean that in the UK journal articles now only 'count' towards the institution's research funding if they are made 'open access' and available for free online either immediately or after a certain amount of time (I think two years). A lot of the top journals therefore demand money, sometimes inordinate amounts (we're talking thousands), in exchange for making it open access. It's usually paid for by the uni though.

OK, so this whole academic publishing thing is a bit more complicated than I thought. I asked around and came up with some more ideas. I now think that academic researchers employed in the public sector are unproductive regardless of what happens to their publications. I'd be interested in what others think. I will completely abstract from teaching and other activities and focus solely on research/publishing.

From what I know, publishing, from the point of view of academics, works like this. If you get published in a "prestigious" journal (one listed in the Web of Knowledge or similar databases; of course, this is a very dubious criterion of scientific value), the university gives you a reward on top of your wage. If you publish an article in a "prestigious" international journal, the reward is something like 60% of the monthly wage of a researcher per paper. This is paid out on a yearly basis along with a certain month's wage. So if you manage to get some of your stuff published in these journals, you can easily get an extra month's wage (or more) per year.

The reason why the university can do this is because it itself gets funded by the state based on, in part, the performance of its employees. There's a certain research budget for the whole country. Each institution gets funding for a given year based, in part, on how many papers its employees have published in "prestigious" journals in the last two years. So the fact that you're published does not increase the total state budget for research, but it does expand your institution's share of that budget. The university expresses its gratitude by sharing with you a tiny fraction of what it gets per paper published. I'm sure there are other systems but this is how it works in the country I live in.

Here, in a way, the university behaves in a way analogous to a commercial capitalist: the activities of commercial wage workers do not increase total surplus value, but they expand the share appropriated by their employer. The universities do the same, only that they compete for a share in a part of the social surplus appropriated (via taxes) by the state and designated to fund research. It does not make public universities capitalist, but obviously it's an attempt to extend the capitalist logic into this area.

Now, journals. There seem to be two types of journals: non-profit and for-profit. The former are run by public institutions (like national academies of science, research institutes or universities, or international bodies like associations of particular disciplines). The latter are run by commercial publishers (Springer, Elsevier, SAGE, ...). Both kinds of journals can be "prestigious" (listed in the various databases). Both employ staff (editors, people who do the layout, secretarial work etc.) whose wages are set by the standards in the industry (if the journal is run by a public sector institution, the permanent staff's wages are statutory wages determined legally, at least here). In both cases, the staff performs necessary and surplus labor, but only in the latter case does their surplus labor take the form of surplus value. So in the former case, the staff are unproductive, and the journal is run as a "public service" simply to cover the costs of its publishing (the prices per copy as well as yearly subscriptions are usually a small fraction of those of commercial journals). In the latter case, the staff are of course productive and some part of the publisher's profit (although a rather small one, see below), is due to the surplus labor they perform.

The position of researchers vis-a-vis journals is this. A researcher can freely choose whether she'll publish in a non-profit or a for-profit journal. Depending on the field, many of the most prestigious journals may be the commercial ones, but it doesn't seem to be the rule. Anyway, in both cases, the researcher provides the journal with her manuscript for free. The journal then applies the labor of its staff to the manuscript (as well as the unpaid labor of referees), turning it into a paper. The paper is included in an issue of the journal, printed and sold, either in physical form (as a separate issue or as part of subcriptions) or in digital form (same here).

The non-profit journal, by selling issues to libraries and specialized bookshops (who then sell it for more, making a profit) simply covers its costs (the office, the wages, the printing etc.). Maybe it makes a small profit but that seems to be the exception, at least here. The cost of a researcher's labor power required to produce the manuscript is not included in that, because the manuscript (i.e., the product, not the researcher's labor power!) was provided for free as an input to producing the paper. The means of production used by the researcher in producing the paper are also no costs for the journal. Everything concerning the researcher, i.e., her labor power and the means of production she requires, is paid for by the institution that employs her. Whether the journal merely covers its own costs or makes a small profit is completely independent of the researcher's wage or of the cost of the means of production she uses. The researcher is not exploited by the journal any more than a supplier of apples is exploited by the producer of apple juice.

But the same also holds for commercial journals. The profits they make (and they, or the companies that run them, make huge profits!) are independent of how much the researchers are paid or what the other costs of producing the manuscripts are. These are not costs for the journal (unlike the costs of employing the journal staff and providing them with computers, offices etc.). If wages for researchers around the world were doubled tomorrow, it would not (ceteris paribus) affect the rate of profit of these publishers one bit. The researchers provide them, at zero cost, with a product (the manuscript, the raw material for the finished paper), not with their labor power. The manuscript is effectively a (necessary) part of the means of production used to produce the paper/journal (it isn't a part of the publisher's constant capital, though, because it is provided for free, and hence also does not enter the cost price of the journal).

So I think that either way, public sector researchers really are unproductive (OK, I guess there are cases of partnerships between universities and enterprises where other things are going on, but I haven't thought about that and rather won't go into that). They are exploited, though not by the journals or publishers (unless they enter into a direct contract with them), but rather by the state. They don't produce value or surplus value.

So where do the profits of commercial journals come from? A smaller part of their profit comes from exploiting journal staff, and this part can be expanded by lowering their wages. They can also increase their profits by cutting down on other costs (e.g., by making the journal officeless and having the staff work from home). But by far the largest part of their profits has to do with the exorbitant prices they charge for subscriptions or individual papers. They are able to do that because these commodities are unique. If you're looking for a particular paper or journal issue, another just won't do. In effect, they are charging monopoly prices which are disconnected from the costs of producing the journal (this is similar to trade in works of art). The income the publishers receive this way is best viewed, I think, as monopoly rent that derives from their intellectual property claims (they own the papers).

Who pays that rent? It seems that a large part of the subscribers to commercial journals are public institutions like universities and libraries. These are publicly funded. This means that this part of the commercial publishers' income derives ultimately from the part of surplus value produced in the economy that is appropriated by the state and redistributed to public institutions which, in turn, pay for the subscriptions. In effect, the state is, on the one hand, redistributing a part of total social surplus to fund research, and on the other hand, using another fraction of that surplus to buy access to the products of that research (i.e., the journal contents). The commercial publishers are pretty much parasitic on the whole process and they simply siphon off a part of the state's budget for research (independent of the amount of surplus labor performed by the researchers, as long as some surplus labor is performed and manuscripts are produced).

What about the extra rewards for getting published? One would be tempted to see them as money paid over and above the value of the researcher's labor power. But I guess getting published in "prestigious" journals requires extra effort, i.e., the expenditure of more labor power in terms of duration and intensity. So the reward perhaps goes some way to covering that, and perhaps not even all of that. (Researchers also often incur extra costs for, e.g., having their paper translated or checked for grammar, and from what I know they pay this out of their own pocket.).

Very interesting Jura. However, can you explain why you think unproductive labour does not produce value full stop? Unproductive labour is still formally (abstract) labour that produces a commodity, even in cases where that commodity is used up in the same instant of its creation (like a lecture). Equally, does the unproductiveness not depend in part on whether the labour or part of it formally enters into the cycle of valorisation of value? A professor might give a lecture that would be both unproductive to the extent that some students it forms go on to perform work that is unproductive, and doesn't enter into that cycle, but equally there will be students who do go on to enter into the cycle of the valorisation of value. Likewise a miner might mine iron ore, some of which ends up spent by the state on a tank, the other goes into a new ford focus that takes another productive labourer to work, so her labour is both productive and unproductive. As I understand it the crucial point is that some portion of the total surplus value is just used up and never returns back into the cycle, but you can't necessarily say which specific forms of labour in a positivistic fashion. Because academia is more unproductive than productive, and as capitalist society as a whole becomes less productive (of surplus value), things like academia and healthcare are put under pressure because the state cannot apportion as much surplus to support them (even if they are nonetheless essential social functions). It therefore starts imposing modern management techniques, introducing competition and financial incentives etc., to extract energy from academics and doctors etc. at a more efficient rate so that it is not such a big cost.

Productive labor is simply wage labor that produces surplus-value for capital. It does this because it results in more value than is paid out in wages to the worker. If unproductive wage labor were value-producing, then it would also produce surplus-value – as soon as the labor time would exceed that required to reproduce labor power and paid out in the form of wages (alternatively, the same result can be achieved by increasing the intensity of labor above the average level). But unproductive labor is defined as labor which does not produce surplus-value. Hence, unproductive labor does not produce value, either. Anyway, for any labor to produce value, it must result in a commodity that is useful and exchanged for money on the market (the latter is the real abstraction due to which concrete labor takes the form of abstract labor; without it, there's no abstract labor). For teaching in the public sector, the use-value aspect is satisfied, but not the commodity and the market aspects.

Secondly, where the commodities/services end up is not the defining feature of productive and unproductive labor (at least for Marx – I'm not saying that this other line of thinking isn't interesting or useful). The key criterion is whether they bring surplus-value upon being sold. The miner you mention is productive in both cases. The mining enterprise sells the iron ore to the state, and realizes surplus-value, regardless of what the state then does with the stuff. Similarly, a restaurant realizes surplus-value when selling meals regardless of whether it sells them to productive workers or to capitalists.

Conversely, the public sector professor's lecturing is unproductive regardless of where her students end up. It would be productive if she worked at a private school where students would be buying the lectures.

Finally, there are independent producers who turn out commodities or services that are exchanged on the market. Think freelancers (although only the "real" ones; a person who is formally self-employed may really be a wage worker). They produce value but not surplus-value. Because of this, their labor is sometimes classified as unproductive. I'm not sure about this because Marx says somewhere that the distinction only meaningfully applies to wage laborers, and that the labor of these independent producer does not even fall under capitalist production.

Sorry about all the edits to this post, I forgot to add many things at first.

Wow this is getting pretty convoluted. Just to make the situation a bit more confusing, what about academics who are researchers, who make discoveries which are owned by universities, and then universities then sell or license out to private companies? Are they still "unproductive"?

Re: #28, I can't have been the only one this occurred to immediately upon reading the OP. Every time this subject resurfaces the Bolshevik's incredible blunder, in the early phase of the revolution with respect to the intellectual proletariat, bobs up alongside it.

Steven.

Wow this is getting pretty convoluted. Just to make the situation a bit more confusing, what about academics who are researchers, who make discoveries which are owned by universities, and then universities then sell or license out to private companies? Are they still "unproductive"?

I guess the difference here is that the discoveries are turned into a commodity (patent) by the university with a view to be sold. This is what I meant by the partnerships between universities and enterprises above. I don't know how this works and what the role of public universities is. Looking at some articles from the US, it appears that a private investor can be involved, co-funding the research, or a startup/spinoff is founded on campus – talk about convoluted! Anyway, it seems in (ideal) cases like these, the researchers are not only exploited, but their surplus labor also takes the form of surplus value which is pocketed by the university and its partners (i.e., this academic labor is productive). One would have to look at how exactly it works. Here's an interesting 2015 paper from Yale with some ridiculously long footnotes that argues that in some fields, there are actually negative rates of return on university patents (I've only read the first two pages though).

There appears to be a large literature on patents and intellectual property from a Marxian point of view, but what I've seen so far (not much) is unfortunately rather liberal in terms of conceptual discipline (general intellect, the cognitariat, we all produce value, when you click Like on Facebook you are being exploited, etc.).

In any case, the price at which these discoveries are sold or licensed has little to do with the labor time necessary to "produce" them. As with any commodity that is not reproducible en masse, the basic theory of value has little to offer here in terms of explaining the price – one has to turn to rent (the chapters on which in Volume 3 and TSV are a real mess). So what the university pockets would be normal profit plus rent, the latter being in no direct proportion to surplus labor.

factvalue

Re: #28, I can't have been the only one this occurred to immediately upon reading the OP. Every time this subject resurfaces the Bolshevik's incredible blunder, in the early phase of the revolution with respect to the intellectual proletariat, bobs up alongside it.

I'm sorry, but I don't know what you're talking about. Is this about the Bolsheviks' position on "experts"? Care to elaborate?

The Bolshevik's position, i.e. Lenin's, the only one that mattered at the time, yes. Turning low wage earners against the professional classes to the extent that they could no longer co-operate so that industry began to break down for lack of intelligent, experienced direction, and then panicking as the economy started breaking down with for example the almost complete cessation of railway communication because of the lack of trained technical management, and performing a hurried volte-face having created such extreme enmity and misunderstanding between manual and intellectual workers.

Oh, OK. I don't see how that has anything to do with the present discussion, though. I said in the first post that I don't think the productive – unproductive distinction makes any political difference. Moreover, the distinction is not identical with the one between manual and intellectual labor. Both can be, depending on the circumstances, productive or unproductive.

Yes of course, it just always happens that the one subject immediately conjures the other with me.