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"Jane takes Monroe's hands between hers … she presses herself into his hands: a road map of every job he's held, the lifeline of his labor."

Do public engagement and political activism enhance or compromise the research enterprise of social scientists? I offer a personal reflection on the benefits and challenges of grounding scholarship about labor and workers' political struggles in praxical engagement with labor activists, including with actual subjects of research. While scholars engage non-academic publics in many different ways, I underline how ongoing direct collaboration with labor activists can be facilitated by participation in campus organizations whose mission is labor-oriented research and education. My own involvement with the Harry Bridges Center for Labor Studies at the University of Washington provides one example of how this linkage between labor scholarship and labor activism can be sustained in routine, mostly complementary, and productive ways.

Too often, Marxist economists approach the notion of "unproductive labor" negatively. Unproductive labor within enterprises is, however, not useless. Its purpose is the maximization of the profit rate. In Marx's analysis of capital, the entire process is divided into the valorization of capital (the extraction of surplus value) and the circulation of capital. Unproductive labor does not create new value or surplus value, but contributes to the two aspects, increasing surplus value and accelerating the circulation of capital. Thus, the profit rate-the aim of capitalist production-is increased. In Capital, these tasks are introduced as performed by the capitalist, but Marx also explains that, within modern corporations, they are delegated to a salaried personnel: managerial and clerical (also commercial) personnel. As a result of the strong polarization in the division of labor between the two components, managerial and clerical, this analysis leads to a Marxian theory of managerial capitalism. Adapted from the source document.