On Feb 12, 2008, at 11:58 AM, Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> On Feb 12, 2008, at 11:42 AM, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
>> I got into a dispute at a recent Solidarity meeting
>> about "unproductive labor," whether labor that does
>> not involve production of physical object generates
>> surplus value and real profit as opposed to mere rent.
>
> Minor point: it's not about the production of a physical object -
> services can be "productive" in this view. The transportation of
> vehicular components can be productive. The transportation of people
> to visit grandma isn't.
Wrong. For Marx a "service" is a commodity if sold to an end-user (ie., it is consumed, or invested as a necessary step in the process of producing some final product commodity) by a capitalist firm. If used for the purpose of realization of surplus value (which is also the economic function of the governmental apparatus) the unproductive labor involved is accounted for by Marx as part of the constant capital consumed and transfers value to the final social product in the same way that depreciation of a machine does. If the final product is produced and sold by the direct producer herself or by a non-capitalist (totally insulated from the process of equalization of profit rates aka capitalist competition) institution, the labor involved is, for Marx, non[capitalistically]productive. This is, of course, is radically different from bourgeois social accounting--defined as it is by Pigou's famous epigram "When a man marries his housekeeper the gross national product declines."
Shane Mage
"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to be called Zeus."
Herakleitos of Ephesos