as I understand Marx, the labor that the King commands produces no value unless it produces commodities for sale. Public-school teachers don't produce value. (That's not a bad thing, by the way: among other things, teachers are "indirectly productive," in Jim O'Connor's phrase, in a lot of ways. That is, their work helps others produce value and surplus-value.) The value of their wages would be the value of their labor-power, but that's different from the value they produce.
In the US National Income and Product Accounts, the problem of public-school teachers not producing commodities is "dealt with" by saying that their product = their wages. That's a bit doubtful. _______________________________________________ Well that is the problem you arrive at when you apply the categories of a single mode of production to a social formation with a combination of modes of production. It is clear that the teachers produce no exchange value, so their labour does not assume the capitalist value form. But their labour is still socially necessary. The problem I think comes from approaching it from the standpoint of the profit making capitalist. To him it appears that labour 'produces' value. But this is a superficial view, since for the capitalist value is only apparent as exchange value. If we follow your basic argument earlier, which I accept, that value is measured in hours of socially necessary labour time, then there is no doubt that the labour of teachers constitutes part of the socially necessary labour time and thus in social accounting terms is value, even if it is not manifest in the characteristic capitalist form of the exchange value of an output commodity. The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
