Productive and Unproductive Labour is situated in its context, by relating it to the central propositions of Marx’s political economy. In neoclassical economics, the distinction between productive and unproductive labour was however rejected as being largely arbitrary and irrelevant. In other words labour outside the capitalist mode of production cannot be analysed in terms of Marx’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour. It is consistent with his aims of analysing productive and unproductive labour from the standpoint of capitalist production.