>Doug Henwood wrote:
>On Dec 23, 2007, at 5:01 PM, Michael Perelman wrote:
>
>> I have nothing against clarity, but I think you will find a large
>> number of papers
>> spinning their wheels in an attempt to define unproductive labor.
>> Even so, Fred
>> Moseley has used unproductive labor data to make an interesting
>> explanation of
>> downward pressures on profit rates.
>
>It's also a useful way of adjusting the profit rate downwards when
>bourgeois data tell you otherwise. The rate of profit has been
>falling so long it's a miracle that it's not negative.
The classification of economic acvtivity as "productive" or "unproductive" has no effect at all on the Marxian rate of profit, which is nothing but the ratio of the surplus-value realized by the capitalist class (net profits, interest, and rent) to the depreciated surplus-value previously capitalized by the capitalist class. Empirical identification of these magnitudes is difficult but entirely possible, as I demonstrated 45 years ago. If, for instance, all office, sales, etc., labor were to be classified as "productive" then the overall rate of surplus-value would be much lower, but that lowering would be precisely offset by a reduction in the organic composition of capital.
Anyway, my earlier point of the "retail sector" being unproductive does not merely reflect Marx's characterization as "part of the *faux frais* (necessary but unproductive costs) of capitalist production" but is likewise determined by the concept of *real* gross domestic product as consisting exclusively of *final* products. Because the goods sold by WalMart are presumably made cheaper by Wal Mart's "efficiencies," that does not mean that they contribute any more to real gdp than would the same goods sold more expensively by "mom&pop." All that has changed is that the gdp deflator and the money gdp are both a little less and offset each other. Sales is an unproductive activity.
Shane Mage
"When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly.
When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true." (N. Weiner)