andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> Sort of, but as it's usually understood Marx's notion
> of productive labor involves value producing labor
> that creates material goods. This seems doubly
> arbitrary -- why restrict productive labor to the
> production of material goods -- if it has to be value
> producing, why not services and intangible goods?
This is not quite correct. Services (e.g., a haircut) are productive labor if the barber is an employee of a capitalist. Even clerks in stores are productive labor _in so far_ as they are performing warehousing duties, but not insofar as they are aiding in the realization of surplus value. Marx is I believe (though I haven't rechecked in Capital) quite specific on this.
I suspect that the distinction is of utterly no use within an economics grounded in the question of how scarce resources are allocated and how prices are set. So Jim is correct that most of the debates over it cast in those terms have been pretty silly.
If you take Rubin's point of view (and the point of view of Fredy Perlman's Intro to Rubin) that these are not questions Marx either asks or answers, then it is not so clear that the distinction is useless in answering the questions that Marx _does_ as about the allocation of living human activity under given historical conditions.
Carrol