1. How does Marx define productive and unproductive labour?
Productive labour produces surplus-value for capital. In part 14 (chapter 16) Marx defines another category of labour, which is social labour, and abstract labour, and labour for capital, but from which capital does not extract surplus value. The example he gives is a teacher in a state school. The same teacher, in a private school, would be a productive worker, producing surplus value for the school proprietor, but since the state school supplies education free the state-school teacher is a capitalistically unproductive worker - a cost to capital.
2.Which are unproductive?
a) A nurse in an NHS hospital
b) A nurse in a private hospital
c) A station supervisor on the London Underground
d) A bank clerk.
Nurse (a) is an unproductive worker, and nurse (b) is a productive worker, on exactly the same criteria as the teachers whom Marx takes as an example. Notice that (capitalistically) 'unproductive' here does not mean useless or wasteful - maybe the opposite. The station supervisor (c) is a productive worker. The fact that he or she does not directly drive trains does not make him or her 'unproductive'; he or she is 'an organ of the collective labourer', as Marx puts it. Although the London Underground is still state-owned, it sells its products (underground train journeys) and, even if it does not make profits, pays interest, taxes, etc. Not only individuals but also the state (and, in the case of private hospitals and schools, charitable trusts and so forth) can be capitalists.
Although it is not clear from part 14 (chapter 16), on Marx's criteria the bank clerk (d) is unproductive, even though he or she does help his or her employers make profits. In volume 3 of Capital Marx explains that he sees finance, wholesale and retail trade, and so on, as capitalistically unproductive. Given their place in the turnover time of capital, finance capital and merchant capital can appropriate a bit of surplus value, but it is surplus value produced elsewhere. Bank and shop workers are exploited in the sense that they are forced to labour for capital for longer hours than would be necessary to reproduce the value of their 'living wage', and the more their employers can squeeze them the more profits they make, but actually they are paid out of the surplus value produced by workers elsewhere.
Many students - and many Marxist economists, too - find this baffling. Marx is clear that intangible 'services' - a kilowatt hour, a bus journey, a term's education, or, indeed, labour-power - can be commodities, but he also insists, firstly, that one pays 'not for the service it [a commodity] renders, but the service rendered to it in the course of its production', and that not everything called a service is a commodity. Otherwise what the capitalists do - after all, most capitalists are not idle; they busy themselves doing down their competitors, harassing their workers, etc. - can simply be labelled 'service'. And the same with all the overhead expenses of capitalist production - advertising, commercial lawsuits, the lot. When your wages go into a bank account, the bank says it is selling you a 'financial product' (the account), instead of borrowing the money from you in order to lend it out and get interest on it...
Every transaction is reduced to a payment for 'a service', which evidently has a value equal to whatever is paid for it. Everything is in order as it is.
The mere fact of the great variability of interest rates - without any correlation to the labour put in to supposed 'financial products' - gives the lie to these apologetics. For a critical analysis of capitalist production there is no alternative but to draw a distinction between the capitalistically productive and the capitalistically unproductive, however complex and difficult a task this is.
Notice, by the way, that the example of the bank worker shows that unproductive workers may very well have great strategic power.
3. What is the value of labour?
'Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but has itself no value'. There is no 'value of labour', any more than there is a temperature of heat.
4. 'The decisive importance of the transformation of value and price of labour-power into the form of.. the price of labour itself'.
This appearance suppresses the transformation of labour-power into labour, i.e. the capitalist shaping of the labour-process, and leaves the whole capitalist mode of production appearing as simply an exercise in fair exchange.
5. Which is better for the worker, time-wages or piece-wages?
Piece wages:
1. Encourage greater intensity of work and competition between the workers.
2. Help the capitalist speed up labour with fewer costs of supervision
3. By allowing faster workers to get more, help the capitalist push the average wage down.
4. Aid sub-contracting
Therefore, in general, time-wages are better, giving workers more security and more unity. However, Marx also notes that with changing technology new piece-rates must constantly be set, and this 'leads to constant battles between capitalist and labour'. Thus if workers are at all strongly organised, or technology is changing fast, one form or another of time-wages is better for capital. The modern preference is for 'performance-related pay', which the capitalists reckon can bring them the benefits of piece-wages, plus greater managerial control, without the 'constant battles'.
6. What does the process of capitalist production, repeated week after week, year after year, yield for the workers? And for the capitalists?
The repeated process not only produces commodities, but also reproduces the class division, workers on the one side - who at best are 'reproduced' each week more or less as fit to work as they were the previous week - and capitalists on the other, piling up greater accumulations of wealth and power. In this connection Marx notes that the working class is, like it or not, made an appendage of capital 'even when not directly engaged in the labour-process'. You bring up your children well - and you do it for their sake, not because any capitalist has told you to - but in doing so you are preparing a better next generation of workers for capital. Maybe, however, you are also preparing a new generation of militant trade-unionists and socialists.
7. Why does capitalism have a constant tendency towards mass unemployment?
New machinery constantly throws workers out of jobs. There are new industries which draw them in. But the pull and push do not balance. Once a 'reserve army of labour' - a mass of unemployed - is created, it strengthens the hand of the capitalists to squeeze more labour out of those who still have jobs.
8. How does capitalism prepare the way for socialist revolution?
It develops technology. It makes production more and more of a social process. It creates a large working class and, by constantly reorganising production and shifting workers from place to place and job to job, breaks down barriers of trade and locality between them, and brings them together in large collectives. It generates a class struggle between capitalists and workers over the terms of the exchange between capital and labour, and that class struggle periodically spills over into attempts by 'the collective worker' to assert itself as controller of production.