Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira
This text was written in 1981. It was part of the essay, "Social classes and social strata in contemporary capitalism", which was not published except in my site.
The distinction between productive and unproductive labour was not developed by Adam Smith and Marx to define the class system. Rather, it was originally used to describe the rise of capitalism in England. Poulantzas, however, sought to utilize these two concepts in order to define a new class - the new petty bourgeoisie. Capitalists would be the owners of the means of production; the working class, blue-collar employees, the productive workers; and the new class, the new petty bourgeoisie, the unproductive workers. In this chapter I will discuss this attempt, showing that the categories of productive and unproductive labour, not only do not help in the characterization of social classes, but have also lost their usefulness for helping to understand contemporary capitalism.
