> anyone remember where in 'theories of surplus value' marx talks about
>teaching
>and whether or not the teacher is a productive labourer?
There's a lot along these lines in TSV vol. 1, but in paging through it now I couldn't find anything about the teacher. The teacher is mentioned in the appendix to Capital vol. 1, in a passage very similar to one in TSV, though the TSV version stops just short of the teacher example (i.e., just after the singer example in the excerpt below). TSV also has that hilarious little bit about how the criminal is productive.
A productive worker under capitalism is one who makes a profit for a capitalist. So teaching for Chris Whittle would be productive (assuming he can ever make a profit); teaching for Ohio State wouldn't be, under this definition. But the productive/nonproductive distinction is of limited relevance to how workers lead their lives and think of themselves. A groundskeeper or dishwasher for a state university wouldn't be a productive laborer under this definition - but if the university contracted out the work to a profit-making concern, the workers would suddenly become productive. (This explains the reason to privatize, of course.)
Teaching may feel like a better job than dishwashing or groundskeeping - as Bob Dole said when asked why he was running for Vice President in 1976, it's indoor work, no heavy lifting - regardless of whether it's productive or not. But it's still wage labor.
Doug
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MARX EXCERPTS
[from the Appendix to Capital, vol. 1, Penguin edition, p. 1044]
What gives it a specific use-value for capital is not its particular utility, any more than the particular useful qualities of the product in which it is objectified. Its use to capital is its ability to generate exchange-value (surplus-value).
The capitalist process of production does not just involve the production of commodities. It is a process which absorbs unpaid labour, which makes the means of production into the means for extorting unpaid labour.
>From the foregoing it is evident that for labour to be designated
productive, qualities ate required which are utterly unconnected with the
specific content of the labour, with its particular utility or the usevalue
in which it is objectified.
Hence labour with the same content can be either productive or unproductive.
For instance, Milton, who wrote Paradise Lost, was an unproductive worker. On the other hand, a writer who turns out work for his publisher in factory style is a productive worker. Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature. He later sold his product for £5 and thus became a merchant. But the literary proletarian of Leipzig who produces books, such as compendia on political economy, at the behest of his publisher is pretty nearly a productive worker since his production is taken over by capital and only occurs in order to increase it. A singer who sings like a bird is an unproductive worker. If she sells her song for money, she is to that extent a wage-labourer or merchant. But if the same singer is engaged by an entrepreneur who makes her sing to make money, then she becomes a productive worker, since she produces capital directly. A schoolmaster who instructs others is not a productive worker. But a schoolmaster who works for wages in an institution along with others, using his own labour to increase the money of the entrepreneur who owns the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker. But for the most part, work of this sort has scarcely reached the stage of being subsumed even formally under capital, and belongs essentially to a transitional stage.
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[from Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1, Progress edition, p. 293]
As all capitalist production rests on the direct purchase of labour in order to appropriate a part of it without purchase in the process of production; which part however is sold in the product-since this is the basis of existence of capital, its very essence-is not the distinction between labour which produces capital and that which does not produce it the basis for an understanding of the process of capitalist production? Smith does not deny that the servant's labour is productive for him. Every service is productive for its seller. To swear false oaths is productive for the person who does it for cash. Forging documents is productive for anyone paid to do it. A murder is productive for a man who gets paid for doing it. The trade of sycophant, informer, toady, parasite, lickspittle, is productive for people who do not perform these "services" gratis. Hence they are "productive, labourers", producers not only of wealth but of capital. The thief, too, who pays himself-just as the law-courts and the State do - "employs his energy, uses it in a particular way, produces a result which satisfies a human need", i. e., the need of the thief and perhaps also that of his wife and children. Consequently [he is a] productive labourer if it is merely a question of producing a "result" which satisfies a "need", or as in the cases mentioned above, if selling his "services" is enough to make them "productive".
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[from Theories of Surplus Value, vol. 1, Progress edition, pp. 387-388]
APOLOGIST CONCEPTION OF THE PRODUCTIVITY OF ALL PROFESSIONS
A philosopher produces ideas, a poet poems, a clergyman sermons, a professor compendia and so on. A criminal produces crimes. If we look a little closer at the connection between this latter branch of production and society as a whole, we shall rid ourselves of many prejudices. The criminal produces not only crimes but also criminal law, and with this also the professor who gives lectures on criminal law and in addition to this the inevitable compendium in which this same professor throws his lectures onto the general market as "commodities". This brings with it augmentation of national wealth, quite apart from the personal enjoyment which-as a competent witness, Herr Professor Roscher, [tells] us-the manuscript of the compendium brings to its originator himself.
The criminal moreover produces the whole of the police and of criminal justice, constables, judges, hangmen, juries, etc.; and all these different lines of business, which form equally many categories of the social division of labour, develop different capacities of the human spirit, create new needs and new ways of satisfying them. Torture alone has given rise to the most ingenious mechanical inventions, and employed many honourable craftsmen in the production of its instruments.
The criminal produces an impression, partly moral and partly tragic, as the case may be, and in this way renders a "service" by arousing the moral and aesthetic feelings of the public. He produces not only compendia on Criminal Law, not only penal codes and along with them legislators in this field, but also art, belles-lettres, novels, and even tragedies, as not only Müllner's Schuld and Schiller's Räuber show, but also [Sophocles'l Oedipus and [Shakespeare's] Richard the Third. The criminal breaks the monotony and everyday security of bourgeois life. In this way he keeps it from stagnation, and gives rise to that uneasy tension and agility without which even the spur of competition would get blunted. Thus he gives a stimulus to the productive forces. While crime takes a part of the superfluous population off the labour market and thus reduces competition among the labourers - up to a certain point preventing wages from falling below the minimum-the struggle against crime absorbs another part of this population. Thus the criminal comes in as one of those natural "counterweights" which bring about a correct balance and open up a whole perspective of "useful" occupations.
The effects of the criminal on the development of productive power can be shown in detail. Would locks ever have reached their present degree of excellence had there been no thieves? Would the making of bank-notes have reached its present perfection had there been no 111831 forgers? Would the microscope have found its way into the sphere of ordinary commerce (see Babbage) but for trading frauds? Doesn't practical chemistry owe just as much to adulteration of commodities and the efforts to show it up as to the honest zeal for production? Crime, through its constantly new methods of attack on property, constantly calls into being new methods of defence, and so is as productive as strikes for the invention of machines. And if one leaves the sphere of private crime: would the world-market ever have come into being but for national crime? Indeed, would even the nations have arisen? And hasn't the Tree of Sin been at the same time the Tree of Knowledge ever since the time of Adam?
In his Fable of the Bees (1705) Mandeville had already shown that every possible kind of occupation is productive, and had given expression to the line of this whole argument:
"That what we call Evil in this World, Moral as well as Natural, is the grand Principle that makes us Sociable Creatures, the solid Basis, the Life and Support of all Trades and Employments without exception [ ... ] there we must. look for the true origin of all Arts and Sciences; and[ ... I the moment, Evil ceases, the Society must be spoil'd if riot totally dissolve'd*" [2nd edition, London, 1723, p. 428].
Only Mandeville was of course infinitely bolder and more honest than the philistine apologists of bourgeois society.
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