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

[andie nachgeborenen]

Right, it's not worth arguing about. And as you can
see from my followup poast I stand corrected (thanks)
-- I knew that -- but I do think that sometimes Marx
slips into thinking of productive labor as involving
material production.  No matter, even if you say it
just "involves" the production of SV you run into
problems, because it is impossible draw lines around
"actually producing SV" and keeping out merely "being
necessary for the production of SV." It's not
important because nothing in Marx's theory, even
accepting the LTV, depends on the distinction in any
important way.

--- Jim Devine <jdevine03 at gmail.com> wrote:


> <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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