Yeah, I left out all the qualifications, like if it's a car trip, the sale of the case and the (paid) mechanical upkeep of the car), or if it's a plan, similar things and the wages of the pilot. Put in too much detail, forest, trees. I was talking about the driver, so was Doug.
Focus. Is service, professional and/or white/pink collar work productive of surplus value? We are talking about work done in the market economy for wages. The challenge is that some or all of this activity is merely what KM calls, in the sphere of circulations, moving around SV created by others, what mainstream economists call, in their different, rent-seeking or rent-taking.
Some people think, the guy I was talking to thinks, that only wage work involving physical production of goods for sale produces SV. He might be willing to extend that to transport of the goods and raw materials to the and from the point of production. (That might be for him a fatal concession.)
Other wage labor, paper-pushing work, as it is derisively called, by white collar workers and professional and by pink collar workers, for that matter service work, janitorial labor, waiting tables, I think he thinks is unproductive labor. It does not produce SV. Likewise with all work done by public employees, teachers, which isn't directly done for profit, I think. Maybe all work done in private not-for-profit institutions, like most colleges and universities.
Now, some activities involve rent-taking. Receiving rent from land ownership is the central example. Monopolistic profits due to unique control over a resource or technology -- Marx's example in CIII is a someone who derives income from a mill that runs on a waterfall. One might also think of people who get income from patents and copyrights, same thing
And maybe some of the disparate activities listed above are rent-taking. If so, which ones and why? Or are they all rent-taking? If so they are not that way because of temporary monopolies on resources or technologies. It is because the of nature of the activities, my friend was very clear that the core SV producing activity is making goods, physical devices, for sale on the market. Manufacturing.
I think that's hogwash, that capital doesn't care where its profits come from, that the logic of surplus extraction is exactly the same in the case of a a waitress, file clerk, junior associate at a big law firm as it is in the case of an autoworker or textile worker. That's the dispute between us as I understand it.
--- Dennis Claxton <ddclaxton at earthlink.net> wrote:
> At 11:36 AM 2/12/2008, andie wrote:
>
> >The reason a trip to grandma's house is not
> >productive of SV is that it occurs outside the
> market
> >economy and is not done for wages to make profits.
>
>
>
> So you're talking about the person taking the trip,
> right? The trip
> itself is productive if it's taken on an airplane,
> no?
>
>
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