me: > if they simply involve changing who has property rights for some > commodities, work at "WalMart checkout desks and McDonald > drive-through windows" is not productive in Marx's sense. (It's part > of the necessary overhead.) if the people who work there provide > services beyond that, they can be productive.
Daniel Davies wrote: > not sure about these examples, Jim. People like having their hamburgers > handed to them in their cars (rather than having to get out of their cars to > pick them up) and they like shopping in supermarkets (rather than little > shops where everything is behind a counter). You don't have to be a > business genius to see that these are services that people value, and > therefore part of the normal production of value. In what I said above, I agreed with you: "if the people who work there provided services beyond [transferring property rights] they can be productive." The problem is that Marx presented theoretical concepts. As always seems true with theoretical concepts, the real world doesn't fit into the categories perfectly. In that light, we shouldn't think of any specific type of labor and being either productive or nonproductive. Instead, there are degrees of productivity (of surplus-value). Some types of labor are more productive than others. > The analysis of finance > as not being value-creating work is much narrower and certianly can't be > extended to retailing - it's in the Critique of the Gotha Program. the examples in finance seem to be clearer, i.e., with a cleaner correspondence between the theoretical category and the specific case. But what is the part of the Critique you're citing? I don't thing I -- or our gracious host -- wants to get into a big discussion of the Marxian concept of unproductive labor. The reason it comes up so often is that misinterpretations of that concept are so common. To me at least, Marx's categories are very clear and superior to other concepts of productive labor. But I'm not sure how useful it is for understanding a dynamic system like capitalism. One problem is that separating different types of labor-power between productive and unproductive doesn't add much if anything to looking at the productivity of total labor-power. In a Marxian analysis (like that of Fred Moseley), we might see the total wage bill for unproductive labor-power (U = wu*Nu) rising relative to that for productive labor-power (V = wp*Np). (w is the wage, N is the number of units of labor-power.) However, if the productivity of productive labor-power (Np) rises fast enough, that doesn't always hurt profitability of the sort that capitalists care about (the "conventional" rate of profit). Why not "eliminate the middle man" and simply look at the productivity of Nu+Np (total labor-power)? If that productivity rises fast enough, it can prevent any negative impact of unproductive labor-power on conventionally-defined profitability. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
