>Anyway, can we PLEASE stick to the question: does the
>distinction between productive and unproductive labor
>have meaning IN CAPITALISM, especially advanced
>post-industrial finance capitalism like in modern
>America, and if so, what meaning does it have?
I can think of examples of unproductive labour in capitalism. The sort of people who attempt to manufacture commodities or provide service using redundant and inefficient technologies. It is unproductive to labour at a hand loom when modern factories can produce the same product with vastly reduced labour inputs, etc. So that labour must be considered unproductive. These are usually people with insufficient capital of course, trying to start a business with insufficient capital is often acase of unproductive labour.
Some insurance products *are* unproductive, in the sense that they don't provide any insurance, but are merely a form of private taxation. You know the sort of insurance policy I'm talking about, the ones mandated by regulation, allowing the companies that sell them to opt out of any liability. And in a like vein, the ones mandated by independent organisations, known as protection rackets. Those who administer protection rackets (legal and illegal) are engaged in unproductive labour.
Some legal services, at least here where legal practicioners still enjoy regulatory protection from competition in a range of areas, so that customers are required by law to employ them. The same used to apply in many union closed shops.
I recall an incident way back in 1973 for example. I was working as a trades assistant on a building site when I was assigned the task of cleaning out about 10 inches of concrete dust and rubble from a newly constructed industrial building. I went to the store to get some tools, asked for a shovel and a wheelbarrow, but as I did the site shop steward of the Labourers Union heard me. He went ballistic, insisting that these were labourers' tools and I had no right to touch such tools. Threatened to walk out and close the whole site down if I so much as touched a shovel.
I had to do it with only the tools a tradesman's assistant was entitled to deploy - a broom. Kept me busy for days. Likewise, this is unproductive labour. But aside from the legal profession, the closed shop is all but dead these days.
There are all sorts of things that could be called unproductive, but its at the fringes and in the cracks of capitalist society.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell tas