Tahir: I take it that the key phrase here is "it seems". You do at least leave open the possibility that you may have misinterpreted. Thanks for that.
I think that a better way of conceptualizing this subject is transaction cost approach. Transaction costs are "unproductive" in the sense of being a drain on the productive capacity, but yet they are necessary to carry the production. For example, you have to have legal arrangements (transaction cost) to carry out production by free market agents e.g. to secure contracts and enforce them. Therefore, legal cost are productive in the sense of making production under certain institutionsl arrangements possible.
However, a different instituional arrangement (e.g. vertically and horizintally integrated organizations, aka cartels, keiratsu, or centrally planned economies) may not involve contracts between independent parties, and thus legal costs of contracting are not a part of its transaction costs. Everything else being equal, a vertically and horizontally integrated instituion offers lower transaction costs than free market, and thus it is more productive or efficient than free market.
Tahir: I would prefer to leave the question of institutions open and deal with the essential questions first. This does mean abstracting from the institutions or systems that one knows, whether real or imaginary, and focusing instead on human need. From this perpsective there are two essentially productive activities: producing the means of production and producing the means of consumption. Anything else should be situated in relation to these. To me insurance is fairly remote from these. So, leaving aside the question of whether insurance is essential to capitalism - and I think it is - one asks the deeper question, is it so closely linked to human need that it would need to exist in ANY system? I think not. Growing food, for example, provides a point of contrast. I can't think of a system in which food production would not be required to satisfy human need. I don't see this as a matter of personal preference.
With that in mind, three observations are in order:
1. Whether an activity is productive or unproductive depends solely on the institutional system in which it takes place. What is productive under free market may be unproductive under a cartel-like arrangement. It thus folows hat a better approach is talk about productivity or efficiency of the institutional systems of production rather than individual activities.
2. However, different systems may involve very different types of transaction costs. Cartels may eliminate transaction costs of contract procurement and maintenance, but they may incur other types of transaction costs e.g. that of administrative superstructure. Therefore, to compare productivty or efficiency of institutional systems of systems of production, it is necesary to take ALL transaction costs into account.
3. Taking all ttransaction costs into account is very difficult, if at all possible, because different systems have different capacity of externalizing (i.e. dumping outside the system) its transaction costs. A classical example is waste and environmental pollution, which capitalist countries like the US can externalize in different ways, e.g. by exporting its waste to poofr countries or by ignoring the poluution and its social and environemental effects, that is, dumpring that cost on the general public. Furtehrmore, every institutional system creates a cognitive framework that helps to conceal at least some of its transaction costs from public scrutiny.
To me the above aproach makes more sense, concpetually and operationally, than the vulgar marxist infatuation with manufacturing over services.
Tahir: Ah yes, it's much more 'sophisticated'. Well done. Could I just point out that the criteria I have now offered above do not allow for your interpretation. Take medical care for example. This is not manufacturing, but, once again abstracting from all known systems, one finds that it is an abiding concern, equally so when one projects into the future. Of course one would have a debate about what sorts of medical care are better, and how many of the present arrangements are mostly about profit making, etc., but that just goes to illustrate the general point. From the particular feminist point of view that I cited in one of my earlier posts, even sex work is a productive service, in that it may contribute to the wellbeing and functioning of the human individual who is the receiver of the service. Here I depart from the position of certain people whose work on this question I otherwise value, Loren Goldner for example, but the point has been made convincingly by Leopoldina Fortunati in her book The Arcane of Reproduction. It may be that in future societies this activity will be decommodified, but it is doubtful whether it will disappear. What is more to the point is whether the work/play distinction that is now so important is really essential. Things that are now considered to be more like work, might in a communist world come to seem more like play. This does not mean that they would not be productive activities. Sport, exercise and recreation are analogous here. Contrast this with your own example of the used car salesman. It seems a long shot to insist that this activity would be needed in any imaginable society, particularly one that is better than the present. So I prefer to abstract from known systems in order to derive a means of criticising them, rather than to relativise in the way that you do. "Costs" smack too much of the time-is-money type of thinking for my liking. -------------- next part -------------- All Email originating from UWC is covered by disclaimer http://www.uwc.ac.za/portal/public/portal_services/disclaimer.htm