> done in this exchange. To repeat the quote I included in a post a couple of
> days ago: the productive labor definition "expresses precisely the specific
> form of the labour on which the whole capitalist mode of production and
> capital itself is based". (Theories of Surplus value I, p. 396).
This is a tautology: productive labor is that which creates surplus value. Surplus value is that which defines productive labor. Etc. This ends up fetishizing the very concept of productivity which needs to be criticized in the first place -- i.e. capital's ruthless expansion of the commodity-form, whatever the consequences for societies or ecologies (Marx doesn't do this, of course, he's critiquing the political economy of capital and is just showing how the thing works). But Doug is getting at something very important: the *qualitative* aspect of labor. How do we judge the surplus-labor bound up in, say, a great work of art? What would non-alienated labor look like? Isn't the resistance to capitalism all about the freedom, nowhere yet realized, *from* productivity and all its mediations?
-- Dennis