--That would, however, require a radical departure from the “you’re not a worker because I don’t like what you produce” line of argument.--

Anyone who says that sex workers are not proletarians is obviously wrong. If they own nothing but their ability to perform work, and are forced to sell that ability to perform work in order to live, then yes, they are a proletarian. But how important are they to capitalism? Entirely unessential in the strict sense. This gets into a question about the essential and non-essential proletariat, the nature of capital, expanded reproduction, and the concept of 'total capital'.

So we know that capitalists invest their capital to make more money which is also invested in capital. There needs to be some surplus value made, otherwise there won't be any money that can be used to buy new machinery. The factory will run down over time, and the capitalist will go out of business. So there is that. But if all that is happening is the replacement of capital already invested, and the rest of the surplus is used unproductively, then what we see is 'simple reproduction'. What capitalism needs is expanded reproduction, where not only is capital reproduced, but it expands. We can look at this from the perspective of the individual capital, say a shopkeeper who exploits only his own labour, and his family's, and who lives off the profits of his business and therefore has a comfortable life, versus another shopkeeper who keeps his own personal expenditure to a minimum and slowly expands his business until it eventually becomes a popular chain store that is listed on the stock exchange. We can also look at it from the perspective of the total capital. The total capital is not the same as just the addition of all capitals together. The reason for this is that the total capital is not the dollar value of all businesses put together. Rather, it comes from the nature of capital. Capital is 'value valorising itself', that is, it is expanding, it is capital creating more capital. And this is not just 'my factory gets bigger and bigger', but also that my capital makes new capitals. My factory gets bigger and bigger, and makes other factories which get bigger and bigger, which make more factories, and so on. So from the perspective of the total capital, some individual capitals are productive, and some are parasitic.

Say I own a truck factory. I produce trucks that steel from mills to factories. I have productive capital. It produces s**t. The thing is, to protect my factory from punks who break in at night and put rocks in the machinery and cause damage, well I need to hire a security company to do patrols. This company does not contribute to the production of capital and so does not create value. This company is in fact parasitic on the value my capital creates. Rather than creating new capital, the security firm has a claim to some of the value my capital creates. Now, say that during the course of business, this security firm gets big, and has a huge demand for personnel transports. And instead of making trucks that carry steel from mill to factory, my own factory decides it will get better money making trucks that move security guards around. From the perspective of the total capital, my capital is expanding, but it is not supplying the raw materials for other/new capitals. Rather, it is the end point for a line of capital and materials. From the perspective of the total capital, my capital /is not capital/. My capital does not make new values, rather it, too, lays a claim to the value produced by those companies that the security firm protects. My capital exists at the expense of other capital. If the security firm had no business, neither would factory, in its current state. The workers I exploit, then, are not productive /from the standpoint of the total capital/. From the standpoint of the total capital, the workers I exploit are non-essential.

This is not a moral opposition to the production of personnel carriers, nor is it a claim based on 'I don't like what they produce'. It is based on the needs of capital. After all, the workers in the mills and factories that supply the military may be essential for capitalism, to defend it from enemies foreign and domestic. But it is not essential for the expansion of the total capital. The workers in my factory produce, and from the standpoint of my capital they are productive. But the standpoint of my capital is limited. When we look out, we see that my capital does not contribute to, but is parasitic on capital generally.

What I have said above about the factory converting production to security is also true if it were to convert production to luxury. A jet used to ship computer chips from Japan to computer factories in Taiwan is capital, and the capitalist is productive. The same factory producing luxury jets for corporate executives to fly from work to the golf course is being unproductive. We can say the same thing about the movie industry, restaurants, and so on. Anything, really, that does not contribute to the direct production process either in the form of materials, machinery, or the living humans that turn that s**t into commodities.