From: Dave Zachariah (davez@KTH.SE)
Date: Mon Jan 28 2008 - 16:32:51 EST
Hi Jurriaan, Unfortunately, your post is too long for me to read and reply in full right now. However, a few words on unproductive labour. This issue is obscure when one looks at it from the standpoint of capital. But if one adopts the approach of historical materialism---"which agents produce and appropriate goods and labour?"---things become more transparent: Consider a hypothetical agricultural economy. The peasants produce for themselves and a king. The king's appropriation is by definition a surplus product. The king employs a great number of soldiers. Certainly nobody would say that their labour is productive even if we consider it to produce a service of sorts; their upkeep is supported by the surplus labour of the direct producers. Now suppose the king employs a great number of craftsmen to produce the Crown jewels. Again there is no difference, their labour is just as unproductive as the soldiers'; they must be supported by the surplus labour of the peasants. Neither output enters the reproduction of the working population. //Dave Z on 2008-01-28 21:07 Jurriaan Bendien wrote: > Shane Mage whose pioneering Phd thesis I mentioned before, recently > argued (on PEN-L) that: > > "Marx makes it quite clear that the wages of "socially necessary but > unproductive" labor are paid out of [the circulating portion of] > constant capital. While to the individual capitalist they appear to > be a deduction from surplus value, to the capitalist system as a whole > they are part of the overall cost structure. This was demonstrated 45 > years ago in Ch.3 of my dissertation. Thus, because these wages > consist of part of the gross product, the higher their share of the > total wage bill the lower the share of the gross product available to > the ownership class for consumption and investment, and accordingly > the *lower* the rate of exploitation." > http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2008w04/msg00014.htm > > However this argument still doesn't quite clinch it, and not just > because Marx never explicitly says (to my knowledge) himself that > unproductive labour costs are paid out of Cc: >
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