Useful, necessary, and productive labour

The use of these terms in classical and Marxian political economy is not entirely intuitive and requires some explanation. In somewhat oversimplified terms,
 * Useful labour is labour that benefits human beings: in Marxian terminology, that produces use-value.
 * Necessary labour is labour that is necessary for the maintenance (reproduction) of the capitalist system.
 * Productive labour is labour that is productive of profit for the capitalist class in aggregate; or in other words, productive of surplus value.

Useful labour
It must produce a good or service that fulfills some person's want or need, and must, furthermore, not net out in society-wide aggregate. Thus labour that creates a benefit for one group of people but equal or greater harm for another group is not useful, by this definition. An example would be competitive advertising which merely switches customeres from one equally worthy firm to another. The work of the police in upholding the class relations whereby capitalists exploit workers is also not useful, in the Marxist point of view. Useful labour may benefit the person performing it, or another person or other people whether that other or those others receive its fruits as a result of gifting, market exchange, traditional sharing, forced transfer, or some other method. Whether body functions such as breathing are conventionally considered labour in this sense, the present Communpedia editor does not know. Certainly, in breathing one is doing oneself a service – or, alternatively, providing oneself with a good: a lungful of air.

Necessary labour
Necessary labour is labour that is necessary for the maintenance (reproduction) of the capitalist system. It includes that part of the work of the police, military, ideologues, and politicians that is necessary to prevent rebellion and keep people in the roles that the system requires of them. In so far as capitalism is not the last or the most developed stage of society, this kind of necessary labour is not merely useless but harmful. But necessary labour also includes many activities that are useful. For example the labour of parents in raising their children is necessary to the continuance of capitalism but is clearly also useful labour. Some, probably most, and, arguably, all labour that produces profit for capitalists in aggregate, is necessary for capitalism.

Not all useful labour is necessary. For example, there are a few adults in rural areas of the United States who live by subsistence agriculture; that labour is useful to them but does not support capitalism.

Productive labour
Productive labour is labour that is productive of profit for the capitalist class in aggregate. The use of "productive" in something like this sense dates at least as far back as Adam Smith. At the beginning of Chapter !!! of Book II of The Wealth of Nations (1776), he distinguishes the labour of a 'manufacturer' (ie., a factory hand) from that of a domestic servant by the fact that the former will increase the employer's wealth, whereas the latter is a drain on the employer's wealth: There is one sort of labour which adds to the value of the subject upon which it is bestowed: there is another which has no such effect. The former, as it produces a value, may be called productive; the latter, unproductive labour. Thus the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance, and of his master's profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. Though the manufacturer has his wages advanced to him by his master, he, in reality, costs him no expense, the value of those wages being generally restored, together with a profit, in the improved value of the subject upon which his labour is bestowed. But the maintenance of a menial servant never is restored. A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor by maintaining a multitude of menial servants. The labour of the latter, however, has its value, and deserves its reward as well as that of the former. But the labour of the manufacturer fixes and realizes itself in some particular subject or vendible commodity, which lasts for some time at least after that labour is past. It is, as it were, a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion. That subject, or what is the same thing, the price of that subject, can afterwards, if necessary, put into motion a quantity of labour equal to that which had originally produced it. The labour of the menial servant, on the contrary, does not fix or realize itself in any particular subject or vendible commodity. His services generally perish in the very instant of their performance, and seldom leave any trace or value behind them for which an equal quantity of service could afterwards be procured.

Smith's definition mixes in a distinction between goods-producing and services-producing labour which has been dropped in the current usage. Nowadays, 'productive' labour can produce a service.

Productive labour must yeild profit to a capitalist and not net out in aggregation. Purely competitive advertising can again provide an example of an activity that fails the aggregation test, because it produces no profit for capitalists as a whole. True, a firm whose business is to provide advertising services may derive profit from it, but its profit comes out of the profit of the sector that hires it, so there is no overall increase in profit.