[OPE] Services (->Paula)

Jerry,

Actually, I think it gets even worse than that - the doctrinaire
distinctions of academic Marxist pedants between "productive and
unproductive" lead to active status discrimination of workers, and
splitting the working class. They destroyed the working lives of
millions of workers in Eastern Europe. The whacky ideas of Nicos
Poulantzas (who killed himself) and Louis Althusser (who killed his
wife) are a good illustration of how bad the theorizing gets.

The Stalinist "Material Product System" accounts and the "priority of
heavy industry" strategy, based on the "basic goods and non-basic goods"
distinction, involved a warped view of what is really necessary for
economic growth, and they reduced labour productivity and consumption
well below what it could have been otherwise. This was acknowledged to
some extent by the Maoists, who consequently sometimes placed more
emphasis on the mix of material and moral incentives, as well as the
forms of association/organisation that were really necessary for
economic development (the importance of "social relations" and not just
"productive forces" in Marxist jargon).

The Stalinist-technocratic "engineering" approach to economic growth
just treats workers as a technical "labour input" or an "input vector",
but just as important as technical aspects are the social and human
aspects. Hence, in discussing the PUPL distinction, I emphasize, with
Marx, the social-human aspects, in contrast to the "technical
classification schemes" of the Marxists which dehumanize the working
class, and mystify who really depends on whom for what.

I regard the prejudiced Marxist-workerist views of productive and
unproductive labour as one of the biggest obstacles to a viable economic
growth strategy, hence my absolute and unflinching socialist opposition
against Marxist doctrinairism at this point.

Jurriaan

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Received on Tue Jan 13 17:01:31 2009