I am very well aware of the all the texts in the bureaucratic-Marxist controversy about productive/unproductive labour, because I studied it exhaustively as a Phd student in the 1980s, when I was analyzing macroeconomic and labour force data.
But I drew very different conclusions about it, than the New Marxist Exploiting Class does with its tyranny of concepts. The issue is not primarily whether 53% of the workers are productive and 47% are unproductive, tilting the total variable capital and total surplus value this way or that way. The issue is to understand the development of the social and technical division of labour, in which employers aim to maximize productive labour creating the added value that can be turned into profit, and minimize the unproductive labour that remains a necessary cost. This is really the core of the "productivity" stakes. This process of maximizing productive labour and minimizing unproductive labour is a process riddled with contradictory imperatives, which occurs within a process of competition pitting capitalists against capitalists, capitalists against workers, and workers against other workers. It is not a smooth economic process or a technical process, but a political process and a cultural process as much as anything. In addition, the state mediates that competition, and therefore becomes a competitor in its own right as well. To a very considerable extent, the process is also determined by technological developments. If, beyond a few general principles, Karl Marx was unable to define the capitalist distinction between productive and unproductive labour very exactly, there was a very good scientific reason for that, namely, the division of labour is not a static Marxist-bureaucratic schematism or classification, but a continuously evolving and changing framework of labour organization in which hardly any occupation remains the same in the long term. You can say that the division of labour has the tendency to develop in certain ways, but the actual development is contingent on many different conditions. J.
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