> A footnote: All the productivity gains in retail came from new stores,
>
> But since all labor in the retail sector is, by definition, unproductive,
> how can there possibly be any "productivity" gains in retail?
>
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. Obviously, though, the US government's statistical accounts that these data come from don't use the notion of unproductive paid labor.
I have to say that I don't see why retail workers should be seen as socially unproductive. Under any social system, someone has to arrange for goods to be shipped from factories to places where they can be conveniently purchased (i.e. "stores"), display them on shelves, make potential consumers aware of what's available and for how much (assuming we haven't yet achieved the higher stafe of communism), etc.
That's what's being measured when the "output" of the retail sector is recorded.
Seth
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Here, Marx describes productive labour as the social relationship which Capital is. Unproductive labour, from a capitalist point of view, is labour which doesn't produce surplus value e.g. an independent tailor, who sells his skills directly to a client. Of course, a tailor who sells her skills to a capitalist employer, who then vends the skills to customers, is a productive labourer.
Mike B)
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1. Productive Labour from the Standpoint of Capitalist Production: Labour Which Produces Surplus-Value] Productive labour, in its meaning for capitalist production, is wage-labour which, exchanged against the variable part of capital (the part of the capital that is spent on wages), reproduces not only this part of the capital (or the value of its own labour-power), but in addition produces surplus-value for the capitalist, It is only thereby that commodity or money is transformed into capital, is produced as capital. Only that wage-labour is productive which produces capital. (This is the same as saying that it reproduces on an enlarged scale the sum of value expended on it, or that it gives in return more labour than it receives in the form of wages. Consequently, only that labour-power is productive which produces a value greater than its own.)
The mere existence of a class of capitalists, and therefore of capital, depends on the productivity of labour: not however on its absolute, but on its relative productivity. For example: if a day’s labour only sufficed to keep the worker alive, that is, to reproduce his labour-power, ||301| speaking in an absolute sense his labour would be productive because it would be reproductive; that is to say, because it constantly replaced the values ( equal to the value of its own labour-power) which it consumed. But in the capitalist sense it would not be productive because it produced no surplus-value. (It produced in fact no new value, but only replaced the old; it would have consumed it—the value—in one form, in order to reproduce it in the other. And in this sense it has been said that a worker is productive whose production is equal to his own consumption, and that a worker is unproductive who consumes more than he reproduces.)
Productivity in the capitalist sense is based on relative productivity—that the worker not only replaces an old value, but creats a new one; that he materialises more labour-time in his product than is materialised in the product that keeps him in existence as a worker. It is this kind of productive wage-labour that is the basis for the existence of capital.
<Assuming, however, that no capital exists, but that the worker appropriates his surplus-labour himself—the excess of values that he has created over the values that he consumes. Then one could say only of this labour that it is truly productive, that is, that it creates new values.>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1863/theories-surplus-value/ch04.htm
"Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.shelfari.com/o1516968161
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