On Sun, 23 Dec 2007, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> If by unproductive you're talking about Marx's idea of unproductive
> labor, I'm not enough of a scholar of Marxology to say where retail
> workers would fit in his schema
They are part of the circulation of capital in Vol 2. They aren't unproductive workers at all. But they are "not production" workers. For Marx, all value is created in production and can only be increased by increasing production. But the more efficient ("productive") the circulation workers are, the fewer of them are needed, and hence the more labor time society has available for production. So in classical Marxist terms, the more productive the sphere of circulation, the more productive society is.
Michael