On 1/19/06, Julio Huato <juliohuato at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Marv.
>
> I understand, and construe, the concepts of productive and
> unproductive labor in Marx in a layered form:
>
> In any society, regardless of its specific mode of production, labor
> is productive if it results in a use value. Use values are physical
> goods that meet any kind of "material need" whether it is a "material
> need" for human affection, knowledge, ideas, food, etc. (more on this
> below).
>
> The modifier "physical" is meant broadly to include, say, information,
> knowledge, etc. (which necessarily exist in some physical support
> medium, e.g., human neurons, books, hard drives, acoustic waves in the
> air, electrons flowing through a cable or through the air, etc.).
> Note that this distinction doesn't mean that you have goods that are
> pure stuff and pure information in another, but it rather cuts across
> all goods, as they incorporate some information, etc. and exist in
> some physical form. Another important point about this is that use
> values include goods that meet "material needs" and are consumed at
> once as they're produced (e.g., transportation, haircuts, live
> teaching, live performance arts, etc.).
>
> In a market society, labor is productive if -- on top of being
> productive of use value -- it is productive of value, i.e., if it
> results in a commodity. In this setting, labor spent producing goods
> for self-consumption (e.g., taking care of one's kids or partner,
> cooking one's meals, growing one's own food, etc.) -- although
> productive of use value -- is not productive of value. Note that
> labor cannot be productive of value if it is not productive of use
> value. The premise for a commodity to exist is to be a use value.
> This means also that, to the extent there's excess demand for a
> "commodity," the redundant stuff is not use value proper. For all
> effective purposes, that labor has been wasted -- it is not value
> producing because it is not use-value producing.
>
> In a capitalist society, labor is productive if -- besides being
> productive of value -- it is also productive of surplus value, i.e.,
> more value than required to merely cover the cost of labor ("variable
> capital"). Here, labor spent producing commodities by, say, a farmer
> who owns her/his land and other means of production, and works by
> her/himself, is productive of value and, therefore, productive of use
> value, but not productive of surplus value or productive in the
> capitalist sense. Note that labor cannot be productive of surplus
> value if it is not productive of value and, therefore, of use value.
> Surplus value is simply value but beyond a point, so it must be use
> value in the first place.
>
> In a capitalist setting, teachers or hospital workers who work for a
> public entity are not considered productive of surplus value, since
> they are not working directly for a private capitalist. But they are
> certainly productive of use value. Taxes are somewhat disconnected or
> mediated (e.g., not proportional to use, nontaxpayers may have
> entitlements, etc.) from the direct use of public goods and thus the
> distribution of these goods cannot be viewed as a market transaction
> between taxpayers and public agencies. However, if a public agency
> sold the good to the public, then the labor of those public employees
> would also be productive of value (still, not of surplus value).
>
> Again, there's no basis to attribute to Marx the notion that only
> labor spent producing tangible physical goods (stuff) is productive.
> Consider software production or the production of science. The main
> element of the product is not the physical support on which the
> software or science always have to exist but the intangible
> information content (abstract code). In Marx's terms, software and
> science production is "material" production because it meets "material
> needs." Another example is (male or female) prostitution. It is
> productive of use value. By freelancers, it is productive of value as
> well. Under a privately-owned bordello, it is also productive of
> surplus value.
>
> A frequent source of confusion is the meaning of the modifier
> "material." In Capital and Grundrisse at least, it is clear that
> "material" is not opposed to "ideal," but opposed to "social." (Here
> Marx follows Hegel's distinction between "Materie" and Form in the
> Logic.) Marx's usage is akin to, say, the distinction made by the
> sophists between "nature" and "convention," on which all social
> critique is based. Under capitalism, the material process (use value
> production) is "nature," but it exists under the form of a social
> "convention" (surplus value production). Humans can do without
> surplus value production (if the stars align properly), but we cannot
> do without use value production.
>
> And by the way, this doesn't mean that conventions are not objective
> (independent from the mind and will of individuals). Social
> "conventions" have different levels of objectivity: fashions may not
> be very hardened conventions, but other social relations (laws,
> private ownership, etc.) tend to be much more hardened. The
> objectivity of use values is even more hardened, but not as much as
> the objectivity of the laws of physics.
>
> An issue that usually leads to confusion when studying Marx is the
> concept of "material needs" or, simply, "needs." A test to decide
> whether a particular need in the usual sense of the term is a need in
> Marx's sense is to ask ourselves the question: Would this need survive
> in a hypothetical communist society with no markets and no state?
> (Even if you believe communism is utopia, play along.) If the answer
> is no, then that it's not a need but a "social necessity". A "social
> necessity" is a particular society's necessity to reproduce its
> relations of production and other social relations, e.g., the social
> necessity to legislate and enforce private ownership laws, the social
> necessity to trade in a market, the social necessity to make sure
> workers don't steal time or stuff from their boss, etc. Clearly, all
> politics and most legal stuff is unproductive of use value and,
> therefore, of value and use value.
>
> In a market society (including but not limited to capitalism), Marx
> calls unproductive labor that spent in assisting the "change of forms"
> (as in C-M-C or M-C-M', i.e., trade). This, however, should not be
> confused with the labor spent by a Macy's employee wrapping gifts,
> providing customers with factual information about goods (as opposed
> to pushing a brand), or by a restaurant's employee serving food (as
> opposed to collecting the check). Also, in this kind of society,
> labor spent in enforcing private ownership laws (as opposed to, say,
> traffic rules, which under communism would be internalized by people
> as ethical norms) is regarded as unproductive. Similarly, in a
> strictly capitalist society, Marx calls unproductive the labor spent
> in policing labor at the work place (as opposed to technically
> supervising it).
>
> Of course, these distinctions are conceptual and abstract. Turning
> the concepts into operational measures may be very costly, in which
> case approximations will suffice. Some employees, as suggested above,
> perform an array of duties mixing surplus-value (hence, value and
> use-value) producing tasks with change-of-forms tasks (billing,
> collecting, advertising, selling, paying, etc.). Still, IMO, this
> empirical difficulty doesn't mean the distinctions are useless. Most
> often, I find Marx's distinctions to be more precise than those used
> in the current economic literature on, say, "rent seeking" or
> "predatory activities."
>
> A final yet crucial clarification is that, although Marx often uses
> (as I did above) the figures of speech "past labor," "dead labor,"
> "materialized labor," "labor spent," "labor embodied," "labor
> contained," etc. when referring to labor that "produces" value, he
> made it crystal clear that he actually meant "labor required," i.e.,
> the labor required in the future. The labor that "creates" the value
> "embodied" in a commodity is not labor actually spent producing such
> commodity, but the labor that at a given point in time -- given the
> magnitude of the needs or, as Marx puts it, "the stomach of the
> market" and the normal productive conditions in a society -- is
> *required* to reproduce that commodity. He wrote that in the
> formulation of value as "socially necessary labor time," the modifier
> "necessary" meant "required" in this sense.
>
> I don't think many Marxists realize that the notion of value in Marx
> is expectational, as in a Bayesian conditional expectation. Since
> Marx's usage goes back and forth between "labor spent" and "labor
> required," he seems to have believed that the labor spent in the
> production of a commodity (assuming needs are given, under existing
> productive norms, etc.) was a good indicator of the labor required to
> reproduce it. Marx discussed value in the abstract and he tended to
> assume "normal conditions" (supply equals demand, ownership laws are
> enforced, etc.) in such discussion. So, his implicit notion of
> uncertainty -- at least under "normal conditions" -- was rather
> ergodic or stationary. Another way to put it is to say that Marx
> implicitly assumed "perfect foresight" -- i.e., "rational
> expectations" in a deterministic world.
>
> I may write later a note on the meaning in Marx of "sociological"
> categories of "worker," "producer," "proletarian," etc., which have
> been confused a lot. But let me say here that I don't mean to imply
> that people (e.g., Marxists or philo-Marxists) should stick to Marx's
> usage -- he wasn't always completely consistent and his terms evolved
> over his intellectual lifetime as he needed them to evolve. One step
> of real political progress is much more important than loyalty to old
> terms, which many become confusing and outdated as the contemporary
> references are lost to new readers and other things change. The
> dynamics of human language and scientific terminology is a hardened
> objective process too and individuals cannot pretend otherwise.
> Still, it's not a bad thing to straighten these things out
> philologically, if not for other reason because semantic and
> terminological discussions sometimes help illuminate substantive
> issues in the present.
>
> Julio
>
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-- Jim Devine
"The price one pays for pursuing any profession or calling is an intimate knowledge of its ugly side." -- James Baldwin