From: Jurriaan Bendien (andromeda246@HETNET.NL)
Date: Fri May 21 2004 - 12:25:40 EDT
A concept of productive work is necessarily implied by Marx through the distinction between newly created value and conserved value, thus, the distinction pertains to that labour which creates new, additional value, and labour which only conserves or circulates value, and the relationship between those. In considering new value, involved is both a procedure for netting the new social product in an accounting period, and a consideration of who appropriates this new value from whom. Because of the enormous growth of capital transactions outside the sphere of production, the distinction between new value and conserved value is often much more difficult to draw, and this impacts on the way we understand productive labour. Thus, the concept of productive work has important implications for defining the boundaries of the sphere of production itself, and the boundaries of commodity production, what the attributes of a commodity are, as an object which can satisfy a human need, to which private property rights can be attached and exchanged. A number of necessary distinctions ought to be made, required to understand the historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production and the specifically capitalist division of labour: - commodity production versus other production - production versus circulation (exchange) - production for profit versus non-profit production - productive consumption versus unproductive consumption - material (tangible) production versus non-material production - production of use-values versus production of exchange-values - production of value, versus creation of revenue - production of income versus distribution of income - production versus destruction These distinction reflect many important social contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. We could add to this list nowadays, the distinction between relations of communication and relations of exchange. If, however, we just approach that problem via a statistical classificatory exercise, we may not solve it conceptually, it must be understood dynamically, i.e. in movement, i.e. it's really ultimately about the dialectics of use-value and exchange-value, and how this affects the transformation or modification of the social division of labour by the specifically capitalist mode of production, and the output-orientation of the production process. This point is not well understood among Marxists. As a result, the services sector and its socio-economic significance are not really understood either. Marx paid little attention to industrial services, partly because he thought that capitalism would tend to convert services increasingly into mass reproducible commodities, and partly because the services are often either really goods, or directly contribute to the production of goods. The real division of labor and organisation of labour is often hidden by statistical classifications; businesspeople prefer to talk about "product chains". To give some examples of the complexity of the topic: (1) if surplus-labour has been performed, but the output has not been sold, then no surplus-value is realised and therefore, as far as the owner of capital is concerned, the work wasn't productive in any transactional sense; (2) a worker may perform both productive and non-productive activities in one job. (3) surplus-value can be claimed today in respect of (productive) surplus-labour expected to be performed in the future. Generally, Marx adopted the criterion for social accounting purposes, that if a labour function (a task) is itself unproductive, then if this task, previously shared by many different workers, becomes the specialised function of one worker who has this as a job, which helps generate surplus-value for the owner of capital, then the function itself does not thereby become productive - but whether this theorem is always correct is a moot point, it must be understood dialectically, which in a few cases could be very difficult. The real issue however is to understand whether value is conserved, or newly created, i.e. how surplus-labor corresponds to the new output. Five aspects to understand about the topic, I think, are that: (1) the concept of productive work should not be viewed as static, cut-and-dried, fixed and eternal, but historically and developmentally, i.e. it is historically defined according to the real development of the social and technical division of labour, the real development of real capitalist societies. Only empirical analysis can reveal what the real magnitudes are and what the class relationship is. ' (2) the definition or determination of productive work itself is never neutral but subject to a contest between social classes, and the only "objective" definition, is a definition in terms of what work is conducive to the expansion of the capitalist mode of production as a whole, the expansion of the mass (volume) of surplus-value, but acquiring precision here requires an empirical analysis. If real production stagnates while financial claims to the social product multiply, then you can say that the capitalist mode of production is in decline, but saying that in itself doesn't of course resolve the conceptual problem. (3) whether or not work has been productive or not can really be known only a posteriori in capitalist society, because the commodity-producing living labour, in contrast to labour power, is in most cases definitely valued in the market only after it has been performed when its product (a good or service) is exchanged and paid for. (4) The imperialist division of work creates an international hierarchy of occupational functions, concentrating financial and technical service functions in the imperialist countries, and material production in the dominated countries. In addition, that hierarchy is replicated within the developed countries themselves. At the top, there are wellpaid permanent functions by qualified workers, in the middle lower-paid permanent and contract jobs, and at the bottom parttime, casual and unpaid jobs. (5) The growth of the economic significance of services reflects the growth of productivity in the sphere of material production of goods, i.e. it is itself an expression of increased material wealth and higher educational levels. Services include both production tasks and exchange tasks. Labour-value is "lodged in commodities and services exchanged for money (a commodity is a tradeable object, which could be a good or defined service; in the case of a "true" service, the production and consumption of the service in Marx's sense are simultaneous), and thus we must be able to distinguish between the total commodity product, and financial claims on this product. If we start saying, for example, that financial claims on the total commodity product are themselves part of the commodity product, then this just confuses things, because then we conflate financial claims on material wealth, with the real increase in real material wealth, and we confuse production and exchange. When we seek to establish the real value of the social product (the value product) in a Marxian sense, we must distinguish the constant capital that buys labour-time performed for the purpose of implementing financial transactions that facilitate the circulation of the product, and ensuring that those financial transactions will occur in a regulated way. This type of labour is unproductive macroeconomically in the sense that it relates to functions which have to do purely with (1) the existence of class society, (2) the existence and securing private property relations, (3) financial transactions, (4) competitive processes (5) insurance and safety Generally, the owner of production capital looks at productive labour from the point of view of whether this labour is an impost on production, a necessary cost, or a faux frais of production, which does not directly add value to the commodity product that is the source of surplus-value, or whether it directly does add value to this tangible output of the enterprise. This may be difficult to determine by management even at the enterprise level prior to the payment upon sale of output. But from the standpoint of society as a whole, from the standpoint of total social capital, the labour regarded as productive micro-economically may not be regarded as productive, i.e. a variable capital may be a circulating constant capital from the social point of view. This much is necessarily implied by Marx's premiss that no additional value is added through the process of exchange itself (I'm not talking about physical transportation and storage of perishables etc. here, just about financial transactions). From the point of view of the working class under capitalism, the question is not whether the labour produces surplus-value or not, it is (1)whether or not this labour represents a net addition to the tangible material wealth, which, as we know, has acquired the value form under capitalism, and (2) whether it is socially useful labour. If the labour just consists in producing financial claims to products, then whereas micro-economically this may appear productive, insofar as it generates surplus-value for owners of capital, it isn't productive from a macro-economic point of view. It's just that, if the proportion of service labour and financial parasitism grows, and the sophistication of means of communication increases, then culturally it becomes much more difficult to make the distinction in a credible and precise way. Even so, it is perfectly clear in 95% of cases what productive labour is. In 5% of cases it's a bit blurry. In a real military war, where the survival of society is at stake, the dispute is usually resolved jolly quickly, all blurriness vanishes, and the difference between what is production and what is exchange asserts itself with a vengeance; people realise jolly quickly that the whole edifice of financial claims on the tangible social product, and the labour that specifically maintains these claims, is dependent upon real material production of tangible goods and services in which value is lodged, and not vice versa. The uneven development of capitalism on a world scale, producing extremes in the social division of labour, may mystify this, but a real war sorts it out the conceptual distinction very quickly. In a socialist society, the allocation of human labour-time in the economy, required to sustain and develop human life, would be evaluated and decided upon primarily according to (1) whether the labour promotes an increase in real material wealth, (2) whether it is socially useful, (3) whether it is ecologically responsible, (4) whether it promotes human satisfaction and development (5) whether it promotes or destroys human health and wellbeing. But if this is to be done correctly, we cannot just vent banalities about productive labor, we really need to understand and separate out empirically those functions in the technical and social division of labour which are a legacy of capitalist mismanagement and bureaucracy, and those which are genuinely necessary and technically indispensable. Based on these sorts of considerations, I would not throw out the critical concept of productive and non-productive labour, precisely because it is part of the critique of capitalism that (1) it devotes an increasing portion of society's labour-time to activities which either do not add to material wealth, inhibit this, do not really conserve it, or in fact reduce material wealth (destroy it), and (2) it modifies the social and technical division of labour, according to private profit-oriented conceptions of productive labour, which create occupations which are technically unnecessary, alienating, harmful or stultifying for human beings, without being "productive" in any other way than expanding the volume of surplus-value or maintaining the production of surplus-value. Be that as it may, the real problem is that people quibble about the definition of productive labour instead in investigating the division of' labor and the social organisation of labor empirically. Marx did not have the last word to say on the topic, nor could he, since the capitalist modification of the division of labor changes the definition of what is productive and what is not. In the final analysis, work is not "naturally productive", both in the sense that it takes work to make work productive, and that productive work depends on tools and techniques (means of production) to be productive. Thus, we should distinguish between a transhistorical concept of productive labour, and a specifically capitalist concept of productive labour. The transhistorical concept is that the producer must be able to create a product larger than is required to sustain and reproduce the labour-power of that producer over time, i.e. a magnitude greater than the equivalent of his means of subsistence. In other words, he must be able to perform surplus- labour. The specifically capitalist concept is that the work creates surplus-value which is privately appropriated upon realisation in exchange, in virtue of capital ownership and command over the labor of others. The two concepts may not imply each other; thus, in the case of slave labour, forced labour or super-exploitation, the producer becomes expendable in the relentless pursuit of surplus-value. Jurriaan
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