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

[tfast]

There seems to be a base confusion here between Marxist terminology of 
productive and unproductive and the more populist and mainstream 
formulations which tend to revolve around notions of activity in the 
"real" economy and the "overhead" including speculative activities.  
Either some activities can be classified as producing total aggregate 
profit and others as claims on that total aggregate or there can not.  
In the latter case all activity that is mediated by money would have to 
be considered as "augmenting profit".  If you do not agree with this 
then you have to specify on what grounds you are determining which 
activities count as augmenting total profit and which activities you 
consider to be deductions (transfers) from total profits.  It may be a 
complex exercise but that does not make it conceptually or empirically 
un-important. 

Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:


>Yoshie: 
>
>  
>
>>Highways aren't built by government workers, i.e. 
>>unproductive workers.  
>>    
>>
>
>Yoshie, out of sheer curiosity - what kind of worker are you, productive or
>unproductive?  If you consider yourself productive, you also should consider
>government workers productive, sine both you and government workers do the
>same thing - process information.  If you are not productive, however, is
>not your anti-government rant like a kettle calling a pot black?  Why should
>anyone take it seriously, especially that government unproductivity has a
>greater use value (e.g. statistics that are of great use to many people)
>than rants produced by disgruntled intellectuals whose only tangible effect
>is making people upset or depressed?
>
>Wojtek
>
>
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