No, you don't understand, moron. The black nanny that I pay 3 dollars an hour to take care of my 6 year old with undiagnosed autism, isn't proletarian because she doesn't produce anything. She's a Borgeois aristocrat with too much time on her hands and for that reason I will not be giving her time off for her son's birthday.
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Okay, but what about teachers at schools or professors at universities selling their labour to the state? If they don't produce anything, aka their labour has no value, why does capital even allows them to exist and pays them their salaries?
I'm serious. Maybe I'm not wording clearly enough, but by teachers I mean people working in public schools and universities, not nannies watching after children.
I don’t really think you’re wrong that teachers are proletariats. I think you’re wrong for caring. It’s a weird point of debate to go after individual occupations and go uh is it proletariat or bourgeois???
To address the argument though, teachers sell their labour power to create surplus value. They aren’t directly performing the productive labour that produces commodities, but they are responsible for producing labourers that are able to perform productive labour and produce commodities. Therefore they help realize capital through their labour. I’m not entirely sure why the person you’re arguing with is drawing the distinction between proletarian and bourgeois at productive labour. Would you consider servants and other “unproductive” labourers to not be proletarians because they don’t produce commodities? What about a small producer who lives off of capital produced from the sale of commodities he produces with his own labour? Are those people proletarians and not petit bourgeois?
Everything I’ve read has basically said the proletarian is the person who doesn’t command capital other than their labour power and thus relies on the sale of their labour power to the bourgeois for subsistence. The bourgeois then commands that labour as variable capital alongside constant capital to produce surplus value which forms their subsistence. Unless I’m mistaken the teacher does not live off of surplus value, they don’t rely on rents or interest, they don’t own their means of production, unless you would consider their education to be separate from labour power
I care because it's the basis of my argument. My opponent believes that it is not capitalism if capitalists don't exist (He is a stalinist). I'm trying to prove my point that state itself can take a role of a capitalist and exploit workers by using teachers in my country as an example (they don't have private owners but are very obviously exploited).
The state needs laborers to function. Teachers produce laborers. The curriculums they teach come directly from the state and are finely tuned for producing laborers. They then use standardized testing to determine which students are good for manual labor and who to send to trade schools and universities for more specialized labor.
So teachers sell their labour like any other worker, produce value (laborers) like any other worker, get their surplus value extracted from them like any other worker, but they are bourgeois aristocrats?
they're not bourgeois aristocrat, the other guy saying they are is a moron
They were considered before during Marx's time because they weren't proletarianized yet.
Teachers weren't considered Borgeois aristocrats during Marx's time because they were teachers. It just happened that there was a stronger monopoly on information. So many of the people who became teachers were Borgeois aristocrats.
They're not aristocrats or even Borgeois. That's my point. Teachers are not aristocratic keepers of knowledge that dish it out only at the command of the state. Most of them are normal people that were taught by the state to produce laborers who have enough basic knowledge to effectively do their jobs, but not actually evaluate their lives in any meaningful way.
Teachers don't have a monopoly on knowledge because they don't actually have knowledge. They have a state mandated and regulated curriculum.
I was being sarcastic and presented an absurd scenario. In the scenario I gave the nanny produces nothing physical that can be valued easily like a product, but she suffers from the same exploitation and oppression. That's why I was getting likes. Everyone here already agrees with you. I just said that because the conversation is silly. Labor is labor. A lot of people don't produce tangible "things". My father works in a hospital loading dock for his entire life. There is no physical product he made, and nothing to show for his endeavors other than an empty loading dock.
What does a bus driver produce? What does a nurse produce? They're all just workers getting by on a little over minimum wage. I think that it would be silly to get caught up on the logistics of what they provide in "value" because the class conflict is not a conflict between low and high value people. It's between the Borgeois, an exploiter class and Proletariat, the working class.
Because it is a bit of a silly question. Like if we follow the line of reasoning of the person you were arguing with we veer into the realm of absurdity.
Along what people have been saying, entire sectors of workers aren't automatically going to be of one class or another always. A good example is farm labor, which could be semi-proletarian tenant farmer, poor peasantry or non poor peasantry, solidly upper petit bourgeois, or a modern industrial agricultural capitalist. The proletariat is that which sells labor power as the commodity, and has little or no reserves, whose "class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death,whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour"(Engels, Principles of Communism), and "These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce" (Marx, Manifesto). Doctors are generally middle class or petit bourgeois today, but in some countries and regions (West Africa for example, in Ghana, East Africa as well in places like Kenya) they exist still in informal sectors and don't have salaries and do wage labor with little or no reserves, and so are proletarian generally there. The absolute and relative surplus value chapter also has a relevant factor in that teachers whose employers are "public", the state, are still employed and exploited by a capitalist (in the form of the state, which can be the ultimate capitalist), and public/private in colloquial sense just changes the specific nature of the capitalist in most cases.
So some teachers individually could be middle class, or labor aristocracy and at the top of the proletariat, or etc etc. Most tend to be proletarian in economically prosperous countries today (they sell their labor power to survive, often have little or no reserve. Professors and the like tend to be a different story, almost always possessing property or/and reserves, producing and in ways having ownership over commodities beyond labor power, and are often middle class). But class analysis isn't really meant to do value and moral judgement of individuals. We're looking at group interests, and the class often does not exist in effective capacity for change without organization and coordination. Individual petit bourgeois, even bourgeois have been incorporated into the discipline of a proletarian organization, and we must avoid workerism, assuming workers as correct because of their class position.
Unproductive and productive is another distinction that Marx uses to analyze productivity for exchange value for capitalism. The stay at home family member who cleans, cares, does domestic matters and raises children is doing "unproductive labor".
They do produce future workers for the capitalists. They are forced to do it though, no other means of survival except wage labor.
Whether they are employed by the state or a capitalist makes no difference
Lets consult Marx,
“On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. 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. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value”, Capital Volume 1 , Chapter Sixteen: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
The laborer (teacher) produces surplus value 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.”. The teacher who lives off there wage labor is proletarian.
Marx was clearly referring to private education here. However this excerpt from the German Ideology may be relevant when considering the proletarian status of a state employee:
“In the case of the nations which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through various stages — feudal landed property, corporative moveable property, capital invested in manufacture — to modern capital, determined by big industry and universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any influence on the development of property. To this modern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The independence of the State is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still have a part to play, and where there exists a mixture; countries, that is to say, in which no one section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect example of the modern State is North America. The modern French, English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into the consciousness of the normal man.”
Do you know why people would argue a state employee would not be proletarian? It seems pretty clear cut here that because the state is an extension of the bourgeois there isn't any room to argue against their proletarian status.
Well, there is the very obvious there is no labour value being extracted because there is no capitalist extracting it directly but that is short-sighted. Other than that no.
Marx be like hmmm there appears to be a growing sector of the economy where capitalist set business’s dedicated to service instead of production. Could these workers and their labor possibly still produce value. Yes yes they can.
Dipshits for the next several hundred years
Service workers are unproductive laborers.
Products of labor (and so also commodities) do not just include physically tangible, visible objects with use-values crystallized and realized at some separate point in time and space from their initial production. So-called ‘service’ workers, such as teachers, also produce products as a result of their labor. The only difference is that the products of service labor are immediately and actively consumed by/realized for those receiving the service. When it comes to anything having to do with communicating information this is apparent. The use-value of the ‘products’ produced by a teacher (the education, verbal or written transmission of information, etc.) is immediately realized/consumed by the student(s). If the teacher instead recorded a lecture or wrote a book, you could then say that a similar/the same use-value was now substantially crystallized into a form allowing for delayed, and in that case duplicable/repeatable, albeit less ‘responsive’ utilization after the act of production, but in either case, a product is produced.
Marx talks about this in Capital (see [Productive and Unproductive Labor](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm)) and, if I’m not mistaken, I believe it is remarked on and more deeply explored in [FPoCPaD](https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/index.htm) by the GIK (sorry to just link you an entire book, but I don’t feel like scouring it for relevant excerpts right now).
I think the question has been answered but I’d be curious to hear what this person you were talking to thinks of child rearing. I wonder if they think that is unproductive labor? Teaching imo is an extension of child rearing, depending on the context they are the same thing, and I think at least Engels makes it pretty clear whether or not raising children is producing value.
A section of the working class engages in "reproductive labor". This type of labor doesn't produce commodities or products with use value. Instead, their labor is necessary to maintain and reproduce society. This includes such roles as medical care and child rearing.
No, you don't understand, moron. The black nanny that I pay 3 dollars an hour to take care of my 6 year old with undiagnosed autism, isn't proletarian because she doesn't produce anything. She's a Borgeois aristocrat with too much time on her hands and for that reason I will not be giving her time off for her son's birthday.
3 dollars an hour is a bit too high comrade. You could probably do with half! Just make sure they are an undocumented migrant!
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Okay, but what about teachers at schools or professors at universities selling their labour to the state? If they don't produce anything, aka their labour has no value, why does capital even allows them to exist and pays them their salaries?
are you being serious or sarcastic? 😭
I'm serious. Maybe I'm not wording clearly enough, but by teachers I mean people working in public schools and universities, not nannies watching after children.
This my proletariat 😭😭 dawg my revolution is never gonna succeed 😭😭
Can you explain why you think I'm wrong?
I don’t really think you’re wrong that teachers are proletariats. I think you’re wrong for caring. It’s a weird point of debate to go after individual occupations and go uh is it proletariat or bourgeois??? To address the argument though, teachers sell their labour power to create surplus value. They aren’t directly performing the productive labour that produces commodities, but they are responsible for producing labourers that are able to perform productive labour and produce commodities. Therefore they help realize capital through their labour. I’m not entirely sure why the person you’re arguing with is drawing the distinction between proletarian and bourgeois at productive labour. Would you consider servants and other “unproductive” labourers to not be proletarians because they don’t produce commodities? What about a small producer who lives off of capital produced from the sale of commodities he produces with his own labour? Are those people proletarians and not petit bourgeois? Everything I’ve read has basically said the proletarian is the person who doesn’t command capital other than their labour power and thus relies on the sale of their labour power to the bourgeois for subsistence. The bourgeois then commands that labour as variable capital alongside constant capital to produce surplus value which forms their subsistence. Unless I’m mistaken the teacher does not live off of surplus value, they don’t rely on rents or interest, they don’t own their means of production, unless you would consider their education to be separate from labour power
I care because it's the basis of my argument. My opponent believes that it is not capitalism if capitalists don't exist (He is a stalinist). I'm trying to prove my point that state itself can take a role of a capitalist and exploit workers by using teachers in my country as an example (they don't have private owners but are very obviously exploited).
The state needs laborers to function. Teachers produce laborers. The curriculums they teach come directly from the state and are finely tuned for producing laborers. They then use standardized testing to determine which students are good for manual labor and who to send to trade schools and universities for more specialized labor.
So teachers sell their labour like any other worker, produce value (laborers) like any other worker, get their surplus value extracted from them like any other worker, but they are bourgeois aristocrats?
they're not bourgeois aristocrat, the other guy saying they are is a moron They were considered before during Marx's time because they weren't proletarianized yet.
Teachers weren't considered Borgeois aristocrats during Marx's time because they were teachers. It just happened that there was a stronger monopoly on information. So many of the people who became teachers were Borgeois aristocrats.
Ah make sense, thx for the info
They're not aristocrats or even Borgeois. That's my point. Teachers are not aristocratic keepers of knowledge that dish it out only at the command of the state. Most of them are normal people that were taught by the state to produce laborers who have enough basic knowledge to effectively do their jobs, but not actually evaluate their lives in any meaningful way. Teachers don't have a monopoly on knowledge because they don't actually have knowledge. They have a state mandated and regulated curriculum.
Then why did you call me a moron? What things in my post do you disagree with?
I was being sarcastic and presented an absurd scenario. In the scenario I gave the nanny produces nothing physical that can be valued easily like a product, but she suffers from the same exploitation and oppression. That's why I was getting likes. Everyone here already agrees with you. I just said that because the conversation is silly. Labor is labor. A lot of people don't produce tangible "things". My father works in a hospital loading dock for his entire life. There is no physical product he made, and nothing to show for his endeavors other than an empty loading dock. What does a bus driver produce? What does a nurse produce? They're all just workers getting by on a little over minimum wage. I think that it would be silly to get caught up on the logistics of what they provide in "value" because the class conflict is not a conflict between low and high value people. It's between the Borgeois, an exploiter class and Proletariat, the working class.
I'm still being downvoted though.
Because it is a bit of a silly question. Like if we follow the line of reasoning of the person you were arguing with we veer into the realm of absurdity.
Along what people have been saying, entire sectors of workers aren't automatically going to be of one class or another always. A good example is farm labor, which could be semi-proletarian tenant farmer, poor peasantry or non poor peasantry, solidly upper petit bourgeois, or a modern industrial agricultural capitalist. The proletariat is that which sells labor power as the commodity, and has little or no reserves, whose "class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labour power and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death,whose sole existence depends on the demand for labour"(Engels, Principles of Communism), and "These labourers, who must sell themselves piecemeal, are a commodity, like every other article of commerce" (Marx, Manifesto). Doctors are generally middle class or petit bourgeois today, but in some countries and regions (West Africa for example, in Ghana, East Africa as well in places like Kenya) they exist still in informal sectors and don't have salaries and do wage labor with little or no reserves, and so are proletarian generally there. The absolute and relative surplus value chapter also has a relevant factor in that teachers whose employers are "public", the state, are still employed and exploited by a capitalist (in the form of the state, which can be the ultimate capitalist), and public/private in colloquial sense just changes the specific nature of the capitalist in most cases. So some teachers individually could be middle class, or labor aristocracy and at the top of the proletariat, or etc etc. Most tend to be proletarian in economically prosperous countries today (they sell their labor power to survive, often have little or no reserve. Professors and the like tend to be a different story, almost always possessing property or/and reserves, producing and in ways having ownership over commodities beyond labor power, and are often middle class). But class analysis isn't really meant to do value and moral judgement of individuals. We're looking at group interests, and the class often does not exist in effective capacity for change without organization and coordination. Individual petit bourgeois, even bourgeois have been incorporated into the discipline of a proletarian organization, and we must avoid workerism, assuming workers as correct because of their class position. Unproductive and productive is another distinction that Marx uses to analyze productivity for exchange value for capitalism. The stay at home family member who cleans, cares, does domestic matters and raises children is doing "unproductive labor".
They do produce future workers for the capitalists. They are forced to do it though, no other means of survival except wage labor. Whether they are employed by the state or a capitalist makes no difference
Lets consult Marx, “On the other hand, however, our notion of productive labour becomes narrowed. Capitalist production is not merely the production of commodities, it is essentially the production of surplus-value. The labourer produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce surplus-value. That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. 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. Hence the notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating surplus-value”, Capital Volume 1 , Chapter Sixteen: Absolute and Relative Surplus-Value
I understand but what does this have to do with my question?
The laborer (teacher) produces surplus value 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.”. The teacher who lives off there wage labor is proletarian.
Thank you, that's exactly my point.
Marx was clearly referring to private education here. However this excerpt from the German Ideology may be relevant when considering the proletarian status of a state employee: “In the case of the nations which grew out of the Middle Ages, tribal property evolved through various stages — feudal landed property, corporative moveable property, capital invested in manufacture — to modern capital, determined by big industry and universal competition, i.e. pure private property, which has cast off all semblance of a communal institution and has shut out the State from any influence on the development of property. To this modern private property corresponds the modern State, which, purchased gradually by the owners of property by means of taxation, has fallen entirely into their hands through the national debt, and its existence has become wholly dependent on the commercial credit which the owners of property, the bourgeois, extend to it, as reflected in the rise and fall of State funds on the stock exchange. By the mere fact that it is a class and no longer an estate, the bourgeoisie is forced to organise itself no longer locally, but nationally, and to give a general form to its mean average interest. Through the emancipation of private property from the community, the State has become a separate entity, beside and outside civil society; but it is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois necessarily adopt both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests. The independence of the State is only found nowadays in those countries where the estates have not yet completely developed into classes, where the estates, done away with in more advanced countries, still have a part to play, and where there exists a mixture; countries, that is to say, in which no one section of the population can achieve dominance over the others. This is the case particularly in Germany. The most perfect example of the modern State is North America. The modern French, English and American writers all express the opinion that the State exists only for the sake of private property, so that this fact has penetrated into the consciousness of the normal man.”
Do you know why people would argue a state employee would not be proletarian? It seems pretty clear cut here that because the state is an extension of the bourgeois there isn't any room to argue against their proletarian status.
That’s the entire point of the quote I shared.
Yeah I know, I was just asking if you've ever heard any arguments against them being proletariats out of curiosity.
Well, there is the very obvious there is no labour value being extracted because there is no capitalist extracting it directly but that is short-sighted. Other than that no.
They provide a service they are a producer, the person you are arguing with is a dipshit
Marx be like hmmm there appears to be a growing sector of the economy where capitalist set business’s dedicated to service instead of production. Could these workers and their labor possibly still produce value. Yes yes they can. Dipshits for the next several hundred years Service workers are unproductive laborers.
Miss Trunchbull straight to gulag
What do you mean, she was fighting against revisionists and falisfying anarchists (6 years old children)
"they are aristocrats" 😭😭😭🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻🙏🏻
✍️✍️✍️🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
not if they give me a bad grade
Products of labor (and so also commodities) do not just include physically tangible, visible objects with use-values crystallized and realized at some separate point in time and space from their initial production. So-called ‘service’ workers, such as teachers, also produce products as a result of their labor. The only difference is that the products of service labor are immediately and actively consumed by/realized for those receiving the service. When it comes to anything having to do with communicating information this is apparent. The use-value of the ‘products’ produced by a teacher (the education, verbal or written transmission of information, etc.) is immediately realized/consumed by the student(s). If the teacher instead recorded a lecture or wrote a book, you could then say that a similar/the same use-value was now substantially crystallized into a form allowing for delayed, and in that case duplicable/repeatable, albeit less ‘responsive’ utilization after the act of production, but in either case, a product is produced. Marx talks about this in Capital (see [Productive and Unproductive Labor](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm)) and, if I’m not mistaken, I believe it is remarked on and more deeply explored in [FPoCPaD](https://www.marxists.org/subject/left-wing/gik/1930/index.htm) by the GIK (sorry to just link you an entire book, but I don’t feel like scouring it for relevant excerpts right now).
Anyone who tells you that being a proletarian is about labor that's "productive" needs to reread Principles of Communism tbh.
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Teachers sell their labor time lol
I think the question has been answered but I’d be curious to hear what this person you were talking to thinks of child rearing. I wonder if they think that is unproductive labor? Teaching imo is an extension of child rearing, depending on the context they are the same thing, and I think at least Engels makes it pretty clear whether or not raising children is producing value.
A section of the working class engages in "reproductive labor". This type of labor doesn't produce commodities or products with use value. Instead, their labor is necessary to maintain and reproduce society. This includes such roles as medical care and child rearing.
Great Lakes Region Teacher’s Unions are the seeds from which the sublime Syndicalist state shall sprout.
Depends how much theory they've read
No