---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Jurriaan Bendien <j.bendien@wolmail.nl> Date: Wed, 07 Mar 2001 18:55:39 +0100 Subject: productive labour Hi Jerry I notice interestingly enough some new discussion about productive labour. As regards Shaikh & Tonak, they stay away from too many finicky issues and aim for a broad accounting concept which they can measure. But is e.g. teaching and administering public primary and secondary schools capitalististically productive labour, as they suggest ? I somehow doubt it. I think the central question in the controversy is really this: "which labour adds new value to the total social product (or the net output) - thereby enlarging the total mass of capitalist wealth - and why ?" To answer this question you have to refer both to exchange-value and use-value. But as I discussed with Michael Williams, there isn't any fully objective answer, inter alia because the boundary lines of "commodity production", "material and non-material production", "production and circulation" etc. cannot be uncontroversially specified. Inescapably some "value judgement" is involved. Nor is it clear that labour defined as unproductive is always paid out of currently produced surplus-value, as Shaikh & Tonak's account suggests. (Michael suggested the most consistent concept is that which includes all wage labour performed for profit as productive). The consequence of this conceptual difficulty is that the Marxian general rate of profit (total profits/total capital stock) cannot be uncontroversially estimated either. I am surprised that Paul Cockshott would treat arms production as unproductive labour, because it is a clear case of private commodity production for profit, which stimulates the general process of social reproduction, even though the final goods produced do not re-enter the production process elsewhere. (In my view, Mandel's analysis of arms production in Late Capitalism, though not complete, was certainly on the right track). Perhaps we ought to conclude that the usefulness of concepts of productive labour is determined by how well they illuminate the social relations involved in the utilisation of economic resources. Abstract, ahistorical discussions of productive labour aren't very interesting anyhow; the challenge is to illuminate the trends in the social and technical division of labour (Michael Perelman writes some very interesting stuff about this). Regards Jurriaan
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