[lbo-talk] Unproductive Workers = The Best Organized in the USA

[Jim Devine]

<andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> 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? And why does productive laboir have
to be value producing? It's nor productive id your compnay loses
money? It's not productive even if it is a material goof of the sort
that might be poroduced in the private sector (i.e., not a public
good) but is produced by the govt or not for profit? And why the
production of public gboods nor productive labor anyway? The whole
distinction is a mess. <

that's partly because the material production is something from Smith
that Marx dropped. For Marx, "productive labor" produces surplus-value

 PERIOD. The big question is whether or not this includes labor that
is _indirectly_ productive, e.g., makes profits for a business without
actually being paid out of the business' own revenues.

OOPS, I got into a scholastic debate about the meaning of
(un)productive labor, something not worth arguing about.

--
Jim Devine

 "The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an
intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin

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