The quote from Marx is not a tautology. The tautology is created when you add the second sentence, a contention which no one I am aware of has advanced: surplus value is that which defines productive labor. That's obviously not the definition of surplus value. Surplus value is that part of total value created in a round of production remaining after the reproduction cost of constant capital and variable capital have been accounted for. And that labor which produces the surplus value is called productive labor. Put that way, there is no tautology or fetishism.
> 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?
Not sure what you mean by "judge"? Explain? Evaluate? Measure? In any case, this is very likely to be noncapitalist labor (outside capitalist production), which is paid out of surplus value, but does not produce any.
Suppose, however, the painter worked for a capitalist who sold the work and paid the artist a wage; what kind of labor is it? The answer depends on what you want to know. If you are interested (as we have been in this string most of the time) in a theory of growth (laws of motion), then one possible answer is that the value of the art does not enter the cycle of reproduction through the consumption of c and v (depts I and II); instead the artist has created a luxury good. It is therefore unproductive labor (under one defintion of the term) paid out of surplus value, not productive labor creating it.
This is not Marx's answer, however; that is not his definition I just used. Under Marx's definition, the artist working for capital is productive labor, who receives his social subsistence like any other worker. The difference between that subsistence and the revenue collected is the surplus value he created.
Not sure if this is what you are getting at. Perhaps you were looking for way to put a social value on the art, and the labor that created it, that is different than their market value under capitalism....
>Isn't the resistance to capitalism all
>about the freedom, nowhere yet realized, *from* productivity and all its
>mediations?
I don't think so. No one is against productivity per se, that being merely more output per input (of labor), although of course you can abhor some methods used to achieve it. What I'm against is the appropriation of the fruits of that productivity by capital, and all the evils attendant to that.