Re: [OPE-L] basics vs. non-basics and financial services

From: ajit sinha (sinha_a99@YAHOO.COM)
Date: Fri Oct 07 2005 - 04:53:06 EDT 

Paul, Have you seen my
‘Productive/Unproductive Labour: A note on Marx’s
critique of Adam Smith’, History of Economics Review,
No. 26, Winter-Summer 1997, pp. 125-130, on this
topic? ajit sinha

--- Paul Cockshott <wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK> wrote:

> -----Original Message-----
> From: OPE-L [mailto:OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU] On
> Behalf Of Rakesh Bhandari
> Sent: 06 October 2005 16:47
> To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
> Subject: Re: [OPE-L] basics vs. non-basics and
> financial services
>
> At 12:01 PM +0200 10/6/05, Diego Guerrero wrote:
>
>  Rakesh
> >
> As I have noted, Paul C's attempt to defend a Smith
> criterion of
> productive labor in material terms cannot be squared
> with his
> Keynesian understanding that unproductive labor in
> those terms can in
> fact be productive from the perspective of growth of
> value and use
> value. I don't know whether Paul has conceded this,
> but my criticism
> of his eclectic theory seems unanswered to me.
> Perhaps I am missing
> something.
>
> Paul
> The point Rakesh is that whilst any sort of activity
> can stimulate
> employment - even Keynes joke about the state
> burying banknotes in
> milkbottles at the bottom of mines and employing
> people to dig them out
> -
> the employment that is stimulated is not necessarily
> productive.
>
> A stimulation of employment may pull the economy out
> of recession
> and allow the expansion of the basic sector which in
> turn will allow
> the physical surplus of the basic sector to grow,
> and this, when
> expressed in money terms will represent surplus
> exchange value.
> Unproductive employment in the military may
> stimulate this but
> that does not make employment in the military
> productive.
>
> Smiths concept of productive labour was tied to
> accumulation. For
> him labour is productive if it contributes to
> accumulation. He gives
> two definitions of this:
> 1. That the labour must be employed out of capital
> not revenue
> 2. That it must fix itself in a vendible commodity
>
> I think he was right to give both definitions. The
> first definition
> presents the matter from the standpoint of the
> individual capitalist,
> that he will get poor by employing servants out of
> revenue but rich
> from employing workers out of capital. The second
> definition applies
> from the standpoint of the economy as a whole. The
> economy as a whole
> can only accumulate physical commodities - it can
> not accumulate
> banknotes
> or haircuts. Hence the insistence that accumulation
> depended on
> labour being fixed in vendible commodities. It is
> presented more as
> an intuition than an elaborated argument, but the
> intuition is sound.
>
> On the issue raised by Jerry of whether Smith was a
> historical
> materialist, my understanding was that Marx and
> Engels did not
> claim to have invented the materialist approach to
> history. This had
> already been put forward by Scottish Enlightenment
> writers like
> Ferguson and Smith and Millar. A good Ricardian
> economist like Cairnes
> seems to me to be also a historical materialist. His
> analysis of
> the Slave Power, is pretty close to a historical
> materialist
> conjunctural analysis.
>




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