I’m sorry (and I am indeed out of loop with leftist twitter) but who made these shit up? Not even right wing economists, and heck, not even crank fascist economists make the claims that Starbucks (service) workers are not part of the productive labor. Real goods and services have always been considered as productive capital, and this goes all the way back to Adam Smith.

Just the opposite is true: the argument has always been that whether real estate, rent, insurance, finance are considered part of productive capital. Classical liberal economists like Smith, Ricardo and Marx all rejected these as productive capital, and instead classifying them as non-productive rentier capital. On the other hand, neoclassicals (originated from the marginalists) who form the ideological backbone of finance capitalism argue that real estate is a service, renting property is a service, insurance is a service, finance is a service.

I swear that some right wing billionaires have been funding these so-called “left twitter” to tweet rubbish like this so people are baited into defending service workers and so would be distracted from the bigger argument: which is that finance capital is not productive capital.

By investing into defending service workers, it becomes easier to fall into the trap of agreeing with the false argument “see, real estate managers, bankers, insurance agents aren’t so different than Starbucks workers, we’re all just providing a certain type of service.”

This kind of stupid argument only benefits the finance capitalists.

Thanks for sharing this. I feel like this should be such a basic concept whether you're familiar with Marxism or not. If there are people who are working beneath a manager and they are paid poverty wages and the manager is actively hostile towards negotiating better wages, you need a union regardless of the type of work you do, imo. I feel like the of what constitutes a need is very subjective as what's mentioned in the video but it seems like some people feel absolutely correct in their ideas of what wants and needs are. That's really going to vary person to person, and I wonder how that would really be hashed out in the real world if a true communist revolution were to occur