Are Service Workers and Public Sector Employees Part of the Proletariat?
Deep Dives
Explore related topics with these Wikipedia articles, rewritten for enjoyable reading:
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Ernest Mandel
15 min read
The article extensively discusses Mandel's introduction to Capital Vol. 2 and his analysis of productive vs unproductive labor. Understanding his broader intellectual contributions to Marxist economics and his role in Trotskyism would deepen comprehension of the theoretical debates presented.
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Surplus value
9 min read
The entire article hinges on Marx's distinction between productive labor (that which produces surplus value) and unproductive labor. A thorough understanding of surplus value as a concept is essential to following the argument about which workers fall into each category.
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Anti-Socialist Laws
9 min read
Engels's letter mentions concerns about publishing Capital Vol. 3 under the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany. Understanding this historical context of censorship and repression of socialist ideas illuminates why the 'purely scientific' nature of Vol. 2 was seen as advantageous for publication.
Note: Parts of this are adapted from a lecture from my Capital Vol. 2 class. (If you were thinking of signing up for that class, by the way, I’m embarrassed to say that it would be very easy to catch up. We’ve been moving slowly, and we had to miss a good number of Sundays due to travel and other complications, so we’re just doing Ch. 3 now. With any luck, though, we’ll be back on track next weekend and we should be able to have class more reliably for the next while.)
Capital, Vol. 1 (“The Process of Capitalist Production”) was published during Marx’s lifetime. His best friend and close intellectual collaborator Engels was left to do the best he could assembling and editing a workable book from the notebooks that Marx left for Vol. 2 (“The Process of Circulation of Capital”).
Vol. 1 starts in the sphere of circulation. The first three chapters cover general features of market exchange, and the next three narrow the focus to the kind of market exchange that only plays a central role under capitalism—the investment of money in commodities (crucially including the labor-power of the working class) in order to accumulate more money. In a striking passage at the end of Ch. 6, Marx writes that when you confine yourself to an analysis of buying and selling, capitalist markets can look like the “very Eden of the rights of man.”
But:
When we leave this sphere of simple circulation or the exchange of commodities, which provides the ‘free-trader vulgaris’ with his views, his concepts and the standard by which he judges the society of capital and wage-labour, a certain change takes place, or so it appears, in the physiognomy of our dramatis personae. He who was previously the money-owner now strides out in front as a capitalist; the possessor of labour-power follows as his worker. The one smirks self-importantly and is intent on business; the other is timid and holds back, like someone who has brought his own hide to market and now has nothing else to expect but – a tanning.
Everything that makes Capital not just a brilliant piece of economic analysis but a harrowing examination of social misery and a unique kind of literary masterpiece comes from this change of focus from the sphere of circulation to the sphere of production. In Vol. 2, though, Marx
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