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

Jim Devine jdevine03 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 08:52:59 PST 2006


this seems to forget that (1) Yoshie was using the Marxian terminology and (2) that for Marx, the word "unproductive" had no normative meaning (though it had a normative meaning from the capitalist class point of view).

Yoshie: >>Highways aren't built by government workers, i.e. unproductive workers. <<

On 1/19/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote: > 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? <

-- 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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