> 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.
The operative verb is "interpret". But the problem goes further than this: the boundaries between productive/nonproductive labor are themselves historical, and change over time. What was unproductive in, say, 1930 (Paul Klee's visual modernism) thus becomes productive at a later date (reprints and museum tours of Klee's work). And what was formerly productive, i.e. child labor and unpaid overtime in metropolitan countries, sometimes become non-productive (are banned or otherwise reigned in by class struggle). Let me put it this way: in addition to the problem of productivity, which relates to how exchange-values are produced and realized, there's the problem of what Marx called use-value: not just consumer pleasures, but all the qualitative aspects of life, which get left out of the GDP accounts. If we leave that out of the equation, then suddenly we're thinking -- and playing -- by capital's rules: the juridical division of the world into profitable ("productive") and unprofitable ("unproductive") sectors.
-- Dennis