The question is apt--and points to some of the problem of the distinction. The trip to carry parts to the auto plant is consumption (of natural resources) as much as the consumption of consumption of the resources on the trip to grandma's produces need, etc.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm#2 <blockquote> Production is also immediately consumption. Twofold consumption, subjective and objective: the individual not only develops his abilities in production, but also expends them, uses them up in the act of production, just as natural procreation is a consumption of life forces. Secondly: consumption of the means of production, which become worn out through use, and are partly (e.g. in combustion) dissolved into their elements again. Likewise, consumption of the raw material, which loses its natural form and composition by being used up. The act of production is therefore in all its moments also an act of consumption. But the economists admit this. Production as directly identical with consumption, and consumption as directly coincident with production, is termed by them productive consumption. This identity of production and consumption amounts to Spinoza's thesis: determinatio est negatio. [11]
But this definition of productive consumption is advanced only for the purpose of separating consumption as identical with production from consumption proper, which is conceived rather as the destructive antithesis to production. Let us therefore examine consumption proper.
Consumption is also immediately production, just as in nature the consumption of the elements and chemical substances is the production of the plant. It is clear that in taking in food, for example, which is a form of consumption, the human being produces his own body. But this is also true of every kind of consumption which in one way or another produces human beings in some particular aspect. Consumptive production. But, says economics, this production which is identical with consumption is secondary, it is derived from the destruction of the prior product. In the former, the producer objectified himself, in the latter, the object he created personifies itself. Hence this consumptive production – even though it is an immediate unity of production and consumption – is essentially different from production proper. The immediate unity in which production coincides with consumption and consumption with production leaves their immediate duality intact.
Production, then, is also immediately consumption, consumption is also immediately production. Each is immediately its opposite. But at the same time a mediating movement takes place between the two. Production mediates consumption; it creates the latter's material; without it, consumption would lack an object. But consumption also mediates production, in that it alone creates for the products the subject for whom they are products. The product only obtains its 'last finish' [12] in consumption. A railway on which no trains run, hence which is not used up, not consumed, is a railway only dunamei [13] and not in reality. Without production, no consumption; but also, without consumption, no production; since production would then be purposeless. Consumption produces production in a double way, (1) because a product becomes a real product only by being consumed. For example, a garment becomes a real garment only in the act of being worn; a house where no one lives is in fact not a real house; thus the product, unlike a mere natural object, proves itself to be, becomes, a product only through consumption. Only by decomposing the product does consumption give the product the finishing touch; for the product is production not as [14] objectified activity, but rather only as object for the active subject; (2) because consumption creates the need for new production, that is it creates the ideal, internally impelling cause for production, which is its presupposition. Consumption creates the motive for production; it also creates the object which is active in production as its determinant aim. If it is clear that production offers consumption its external object, it is therefore equally clear that consumption ideally posits the object of production as an internal image, as a need, as drive and as purpose. It creates the objects of production in a still subjective form. No production without a need. But consumption reproduces the need. <end blockquote.
But I guess I'm looking at the wrong side of the M-C-M' equation. Still, isn't there some sort of argument in there about how the only way surplus value is realized is in exchange (hence even the above equation is somewhat unstable.) When I say it this way, it sounds a bit too Austrian so I'm probably missing something. In any case, I think the distinction being made above about white collar labor, makes sense and, in part, the idea that it is distinct from other kinds of labor because of the product produced seems to be the problem with the fragmentation of the classes in contemporary society. If the relationship to capital is the same, then is it really any different in terms of the way it's surplus is being appropriated?
My dad is out of work right now and, though he has many skills, he has worked for someone else his whole life (as an executive in production: at one point he tried to start his own thing, but it didn't take--trying to break into textiles in the early 80s with barely any startup$$ was a tough bet) and thus owns no means to reproduce himself. On his last day, they took his laptop and blackberry and had him exit the building just as quickly as if they'd been afraid of him sabotaging machinery: he owns none of the information or relationships that he used to work with for them. They shut down his e-mail address immediately and was made to sign a letter of resignation to prevent claims against ageim (i.e. high $$$). For years he was working with the products of labor being imported from Mexico, Caribbean, Honduras, etc. Since he was working a different set of machinery, he appeared to be in a different class according to his consumption norm (which is how it's usually discussed in the US) and he assumed he was in a more permanent position than the average worker lower down the production chain (and he probably was--though only relatively). But in the end, he's dependent on the whim of an employer. And, in this case, it is likely that they thought they could get someone cheaper to do his job, i.e. someone who would produce more SV for the firm. The e-mails about Carl last week made me shiver with the idea of him having to scrape by free lancing. He should be retiring right now, not having to look for more work.
On the other hand, I can see the issue people might have with this. After all, there is the sense that, in the big argument that American capitalism might make for itself, the fact that, for years, the executive makes more than the worker, is supposedly justified by that executive engaging in more valuable labor. Even the top executive, who gets big bonuses even when he (and it's usually a he) succeeds, claims that he would have the same relation to capital as labor. And, in so far as he does or doesn't own an actual firm, wouldn't this be the truth? So the idea of unproductive labor would be to counter this, to say that, if you're just pushing paper at the top, you're not producing any value, just shifting it around the SV below, is a powerful critique of distribution, which, at the same time, is a part of production.
<Blockquote>
To the single individual, of course, distribution appears as a social law which determines his position within the system of production within which he produces, and which therefore precedes production. The individual comes into the world possessing neither capital nor land. Social distribution assigns him at birth to wage labour. But this situation of being assigned is itself a consequence of the existence of capital and landed property as independent agents of production.
As regards whole societies, distribution seems to precede production and to determine it in yet another respect, almost as if it were a pre-economic fact. A conquering people divides the land among the conquerors, thus imposes a certain distribution and form of property in land, and thus determines production. Or it enslaves the conquered and so makes slave labour the foundation of production. Or a people rises in revolution and smashes the great landed estates into small parcels, and hence, by this new distribution, gives production a new character. Or a system of laws assigns property in land to certain families in perpetuity, or distributes labour [as] a hereditary privilege and thus confines it within certain castes. In all these cases, and they are all historical, it seems that distribution is not structured and determined by production, but rather the opposite, production by distribution.
In the shallowest conception, distribution appears as the distribution of products, and hence as further removed from and quasi-independent of production. But before distribution can be the distribution of products, it is: (1) the distribution of the instruments of production, and (2), which is a further specification of the same relation, the distribution of the members of the society among the different kinds of production. (Subsumption of the individuals under specific relations of production.) The distribution of products is evidently only a result of this distribution, which is comprised within the process of production itself and determines the structure of production. To examine production while disregarding this internal distribution within it is obviously an empty abstraction; while conversely, the distribution of products follows by itself from this distribution which forms an original moment of production. Ricardo, whose concern was to grasp the specific social structure of modern production, and who is the economist of production par excellence, declares for precisely that reason that not production but distribution is the proper study of modern economics. [18] This again shows the ineptitude of those economists who portray production as an eternal truth while banishing history to the realm of distribution.
The question of the relation between this production-determining distribution, and production, belongs evidently within production itself. If it is said that, since production must begin with a certain distribution of the instruments of production, it follows that distribution at least in this sense precedes and forms the presupposition of production, then the reply must be that production does indeed have its determinants and preconditions which form its moments. At the very beginning these may appear as spontaneous, natural. But by the process of production itself they are transformed from natural into historic determinants, and if they appear to one epoch as natural presuppositions of production, they were its historic product for another. Within production itself they are constantly being changed. The application of machinery, for example, changed the distribution of instruments of production as well as of products. Modern large-scale landed property is itself the product of modern commerce and of modern industry, as well as of the application of the latter to agriculture.
The questions raised above all reduce themselves in the last instance to the role played by general-historical relations in production, and their relation to the movement of history generally. The question evidently belongs within the treatment and investigation of production itself. <end blockquote>
So wouldn't it be a fairly specific analytical question--along the lines of what andie is hinting at--where we'd draw the line, e.g. within a firm where we'd draw a line between having a relation to distribution that is determined by production and a different relationship to production itself? Maybe I said this wrong, but I hope the idea is clear. This would ultimately be a political question, I'd think, and in part what would need to happen is that people further and further up the production chain would have to realize that the instability they felt was not do to their lack of consumptive capacity or the distribution of surplus allotted to them after the fact, but their relation to production itself.
In any case, I'll end with one last quote from the old man which made me think of Doug's previous comments related to the subject (which came up when I tried to do a search on unproductive labor and came up with some stuff on fictitious capital and primitive accumulation last year):
"It is a received opinion that in certain periods people lived from pillage alone. But, for pillage to be possible, there must be some thing to be pillaged, hence production. And the mode of pillage is itself in turn determined by the mode of production. A stock jobbing nation, for example, cannot be pillaged in the same manner as a nation of cow-herds."
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