Service sector accounts for more than half of all jobs in the world today according to statistics. Marx already knew that capitalism tends to displace the workforce away from industry and agriculture towards services, we can only expect this trend to increase. Today this is true even of a lot of global south countries.
I'm not an expert but I can see that service sector is a very heterogenous one, or we could say that it's even an umbrella term for very different jobs with very different social conditions, organizing potential class consciousness etc. Work in shitty uber-like apps, in restoration and hospitality, a lot of retail, and etc. are very hard to organize, health and education seem to be a suit generis sector as far as I know, blue collar work is practically labour aristocracy in a lot of cases or also hard to organize in the case of
I invite you all anons to discuss what do you think is the place of service sector in revolutionary praxis, taking into account the different conditions in the different countries (global north vs south, regions etc) if possible. In a lot of global north countries industrial work is practically labour aristocracy and in its way ti be extinct, and as far as I'm aware in a lot pf global south countries they also hold that status, for example, LATAM region. Should we focus on propaganda on industrial worker and organize the other sectors from an industrial proletariat base? Should we also try to organize the shitty service jobs creating now forms of syndicalism that can adapt to their unstable conditions? For example, in a lot of countries a there must be a certain (high) number of workers in order to be represented in a trade union. Is a more flexible and dynamic trade union structure for specific service employers belonging to this shitty unstable jobs possible? Is it even worth it?
I know the formulation of the problem could be more informed, but even though I'm not very knowledgeable, I wanted to make this thread in order for the more knowledgable anons to discuss this topic as I don't see it talked very much. I please ask you all to not enter the same old productive/unproductive work debate and stay on-topic.
Those uber jobs are gig jobs not just service, gig jobs dont need to exist in place of service jobs.
Uber and such would cease to exist if worker rights were expanded upon, this has already been the case in some economies
>>2830850Let's exclude gigs and focus on service jobs in general. What is their place in strategy? Is the industrial proletariat to lead the movement and make concessions to them as was done in the past with the peasantry? Can they provide a base for the movement? How should we ML approach their labour movements?
I can't give practical advice on organising them but socialists in pretty much every developed country have to accept they're only game in town and that waiting for socdems to bring the industrial proletariat back with a time machine is LARP.
Crucially: the share of agricultural and industrial workers is falling worldwide. There will always be some, but technological development trends towards reducing the need for such labour (in aggregate) and increasing the returns to service work in a U-shaped curve. (In early industrialisation, you hire fewer servants and use labour saving devices in the home. Later, you automate the factory to the degree it's now worthwhile to have someone provide customer services for the resulting manufactured goods…)
First world countries have a shit ton of service workers and only to think about it gives me vertigo. How tf to mobilize that mass of bullshit labour?
>>2830974This chart is global, btw. China is THE industrial capital of the world, and they still only have roughly 30% of their population employed in industry.
>>2830817I think a lot of this is inevitable simply as systems of automation increase standard of living worldwide, but service jobs are inherently less stable and have historically been more exploited.
>>2830891Service jobs will always be necessary, right now they’re just a sign of a further developing standard of living. The biggest issue is with the ways capitalists use them as inroads or excuses to force the labor force to go underpaid for tips, or work extra “side hustles” they can extract value from. Can they be organized? Of course.
>>2830916 Like this comment says, they’re still necessary and inevitable, always have been, always will be. What we need to do is regulate their conditions until it’s functionally only as profitable as necessary in any society.
Service sector fundamentally has no leverage, no means to actually win the class war. They’re completely replaceable in ways industrial workers aren’t. If more proles are in service than in industry, the class war is over, it’s lost.
>>2831239Yeah i agree with Haz and lolgo on that. The fuck are barista and HR departments going to do? Seize the coffee machine and the printer? lmao
>>2831239The service sector allows capitalists to realize value and it's tied to physical locations. It has a few quirks, but in terms of worker replacability and leverage it's about the same or lower than industry since that's very easy to move now. The only people who are not replaceable are probably skilled engineers and professionals.
But anyway, I'm not worried about class war being dead forever, lost, over o algo. Industrial unionism hasn't been a thing since the 80s, and during its heyday, it didn't achieve anything revolutionary, though there were a few short episodes when it did act in revolutionary ways. After WW2 it embraced the role of labor market regulation and after its usefulness and ability to negotiate in the core capitalist countries was terminated it's pretty much irrelevant. Socialism is a mass political struggle and the economic struggle has always been secondary and in 99% of cases limited to concessions under capitalism in hindsight. The fact that nobody has successfully organized a workers party after WW1 is not proof that it's impossible. A period of 100 years is not much on a historical scale. Stop doomscrolling and read some Kautsky
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1902/socrev/index.htmhttps://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1909/power/ >>2831306>barista and HR departmentsWhat about retail workers instead ? Do you know how bad logistics get if those were to stop ? What about people that move shit around with trucks ?
>>2831386Obviously these would inflict damages. But they are closer to what an industry job was than to "services", they do not interact with the clientelle and they do not provide a service in the strict sense of the term. I think it is a mistake to conflate fast food workers/barista/wellness managers with the warehouse worker and the trucker. While both are entitled to a decent wage, one could collapse the entire supply chain if striking and the other wouldnt.
>>2831330Would you say that the communist party should organize trade unions for the service sector which is so unstable that is not going to do it spontaneously? Because I don't think a lot of service sector jobs are gonna develop class concsciousness without a labour movement that includes them, which has to have a trade union. Therefore, it should be a radically different trade union with a very flexible membership, because it must include the people that are changing jobs and or being fired all the time in a stable manner.
There is also the question of white collar jobs, health and education, administration… That also requires a new approach. In some countries health and education sector is relatively class conscious and have strong unions, but mostly succdem.
So the question still remains the same: in what concrete form can the communist party institute a labour movement out of these unstable sectors?
>>2831438Skimming through the preface I see this is precisely on point, thank you
>>2830891Service workers are still proles, not a unique class. This is a liberal theory they use to discredit marxism. Proletariat means someone who sells their labour power to survive, not a factory worker.
>>2831458Cheers, man. Let us know if you get any insights from it as it is an important yet underappreciated topic. I'll also give it a read at some point this summer.
>>2831239if this was true you wouldn't have seen the mass replacement of the world's industrial and agricultural workforce by service workers. services make up ~50% of the global workforce on a planet where
entire countries still have "subsistence agriculture" as their primary economic activity.
>>2831330services are on the whole
harder to move than industrial work. if keyboard factory workers go on strike in the US it's trivial for the firm to fire them all and move manufacturing overseas. if starbucks workers go on strike, on the other hand, you can hardly shut a coffee shop down and move it to India.
>>2831306>>2831396a barista is the last step in the logistical chain that runs from coffee farm to customer. if the trucker can kill the business by not bringing the coffee to the coffee shop, the barista can kill the business just as surely by leaving the coffee in the store (or giving it away, revenue strike style.)
even an HR department: do you really think a firm would keep functioning if the HR department just told people they can do whatever the fuck they want?
you allow a certain stereotyped vision of old-style industrial action to cloud your vision and wind up making statements like "why do i care if the steering rack on my car is broken? it's not like losing the engine or the steering wheel!"
>lot of global north countries industrial work is practically labour aristocracy and in its way ti be extinct, and as far as I'm aware in a lot pf global south countries they also hold that status, for example, LATAM region.
What the fuck are you talking about? Labor aristocracy is the professional managerial class. That is not localized to one industry.
>Should we focus on propaganda on industrial worker and organize the other sectors from an industrial proletariat base?
Wow propaganda? That's never been tried before? Oh and only for the "industrial proletariat" that's my favorite Hazism. Charles Marks famously said, "the only real form of labor is putting together boxes in a factory."
>Should we also try to organize the shitty service jobs creating now forms of syndicalism that can adapt to their unstable conditions?
Yeah let's just wave a magic wand while we're at it.
>trade union trade union trade union
Not revolutionary. Never has been. No communistic/anarchistic tendencies ever believed so, even syndicalists. Lenin even explicitly called them reactionary and he had one of the most idealistic views on trade unions unlike his contemporaries at the time, like Rosa.
Also learn to type. I don't even feel like the question answered if it's coming from some guy who is some brain fried on HOI4 he can't proofread a sentence. Nobody responding is going to organize shit.
>>2832170>Labor aristocracy is the professional managerial classNo it isn't, or not exclusively. Someone who makes fighter jet engines for BAE systems to sell to Israel for £100,000 a year is a labour aristocrat while still being a non-managerial industrial worker (and probably a union member to boot.)
This is perfectly in line with what Lenin said regarding unions and an "aristocracy of labour", so it's odd that you'd close with that, but open with this error.
>>2831306If you think that, then communism might as well be dead. As shown in the chart, and as I stated in
>>2831056, not too many people worldwide work in manufacturing anymore. Automation is one hell of a drug. Unless you want communism to ban a bunch of machinery, you can't bring back the 20th century, this is simply the world we live in. It just doesn't take as much labor as it used to to produce (nonfarming) goods.
>>2832489The only hope for communism is a third world war that destroys most of capital, the only opportunity the proletariat has is at the early stage, that’s part of why all the Leninist states barring the DDR were semi feudal and/or colonial.
Destroy it, kill it, mutilate it, never shall anyone do a "service" (servicing the cocks of treatlers) ever again. All will be replaced by productive, proletarian jobs, which will increase the productive forces rather than shift money around for the world's richest percentile to give each other the labor equivalent of a back alley reacharound
the fact that industry sucks up a VERY consistent 20% of the workforce globally and only deviates by a few percent is actually probably indicative of some kind of law of society we missed out on
>>2832675>All will be replaced by productive, proletarian jobs, which will increase the productive forcesLike what?
>>2832931Factories, farms, and factory farms, nurses and mechanics all die
>>2832974, see
>>2832676. Unless you're willing to run insane surpluses of manufactured goods that end up going nowhere, at most manufacturing will make up 30% of your workforce. Of course, if you do add onto that collectivized/factory farming, that would of course run up that tally a fair bit. Still though, you'd likely have 40%ish of the populace left over unless you want those aforementioned insane surpluses?
>>2833062
…which would result in the demand for food and manufactured goods going down by roughly that same amount, meaning that you'll now need less workers, or you'll start having to deal with large surpluses.
>>2832170Sorry pal next time I want to make a thread give me an instruction manual not to disturb your sensitive, hemorroidic asshole. I formulated all of that in a question, not as a statement, and I even admitted the poor formulation of the issue. I'm fully aware of my ignorance, which is the reason I made this thread, and I felt like I had to make it because nobody was talking about this shit even though most workers are in the service sector today. I just wanted to learn from the answers.
>>2832145>>2832199What do you think? Since industrial workers are, at least compared to lot of service workers, relatively better off, should we wait for the contradictions to bring back an incentive for the revolution in the industrial sector or should we work with what we have and shift the focus onto service, precarious labour with new strategies, or both?
>>2831306>>2832489It's not obvious to me that this is a problem from a Marxist standpoint. Communism = more factory labor? Like the point is sort of to overcome the necessity of labor. The contradiction is between the development of the forces of production (production becomes less dependent on human labor) with the relations of production (capitalism still relies on labor as a source of value).
<But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.)
<No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-sbeautiful lady😍🥰e of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis.
<The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individual and the whole society.’https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch14.htm I know! Pump nationalism, talk about opressed nations and inequal exchange. Then, talk about building a welfare state. Oh, and work with religious fanatic reactioaries. That would work!
>>2832974>Factories, farms, and factory farmsGoddamn, "Marxists" are the stupidest philistine motherfuckers you'll see. Those jobs are going away and are never coming back. Everything from agriculture to mining to industry is undergoing a massive robotics revolution as we speak. I'd go as far as to say that more things have changed in this regard in the past decade than have changed in the preceding five decades. Do you know the real secret behind China's prouctivity? It isn't cheap labor in old 1940s factories, it's completely automated dark factories that produce everything from iPhones to the J-20 fighter jet. Might as well pine for sailing ships and carriages pulled by dinosaurs.
>nurses and mechanics all dieSo, is your healthcare plan is the same "Don't get sick" plan of the GOP?
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