Richard D. Wolff

In Post-Industrial America Marx's categorization of productive labor vs unproductive labor is difficult to picture. As is how we should define the most common form of labor Customer Service. Industrial capitalism/manufacturing capitalism and lending capitalism do not quite seem to cover the spectrum of labor that exists in the domestic labor market. Obviously this becomes less of an issue when presented with the figures behind a global economy where one could argue that Customer Service is the distribution, and therefore the unproductive labor supported by the surplus production of foreign industrial capitalism. However, this explanation fails to address that many customer service jobs (such as the hospitality field) are in the business of marketing the commodity of leisure. Do these jobs distribute their use-value to their product just as manufacturing does? If we view the economy strictly through the lens of the domestic sphere are these jobs generating a surplus-value to be appropriated by the capitalist class? If this is not the case, what are the implications behind the massive growth in unproductive labor rather than actual productive labor?