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In the Theories of Surplus value, Marx devotes hundreds of pages to the subject of productive/unproductive labour, while reporting and commenting the analyses of the classical economists. Many of these authors attack Smith for neglecting the economic importance of professional labour. Marx can easily show that these critics end up by completely abandon Smith’s distinction, because they confuse social utility with the productive nature of jobs. However he, while restating Smith’s approach, gives the narrowest interpretation of it, even narrower than that very rigid given by Smith. Marx considers as productive - for capitalism - only the labour which directly produces surplus value for the capitalist. But surplus value is present in the direct production process, not in the collateral activities. Thus commerce as a whole is unproductive, because it simply enjoys a part of the industrial profits. Equally unproductive are public workers, professionals, intellectuals, even independent producers (peasants and artisans are “neither productive nor unproductive”). Moreover “indirectly productive” (a concept proposed by Genovesi and Rau) simply means unproductive, says Marx.
On the one hand, in Capital I, in the Grundrisse and in other notes, he sometimes opens a brilliant perspective on the growth of collective forces of production, more and more powerful and articulated, where even the measure of the labour-time and the individual production of surplus value vanish. On the other hand, he contradictorily sticks to the formal definition of exploited individual labour as the only measure of capitalist growth. Marx did criticise Smith for denying in principle that non material production can be productive; but he adds that intellectual productive labour is a marginal phenomenon. By missing the increasing productivity of intellectual labour in the history of capitalism, Marx unawares abandons his own view about the “historical mission” of capitalism: to go beyond the realm of necessity.

productive labour; unproductive labour; human capital