[lbo-talk] Petty Bourgeois (was "Big Business Takes Distance... ") [Digest, Vol 2541, Issue 1

[Carrol Cox]

I agree with Chris that services produce value, but I see I was unclear in
my original post. I would claim that Charter-School teachers produce value
-- but _not_ public school teachers. 

Also -- aside from the question of what workers produce value, there exists
that immense 'pol' of activity which (while dependent on capital in one way
or another) goes on outside of exchange: cooking one's own meals, doing
one's own laundry; doing  laundry for the entire family. Some feminist
scholars (at least in the past) condemned Marx for not ascribing value to
household labor; that is an incorrect criticism since such labor (or the
labor of tying your own shoe laces) simply lies 'outside' the  capitalist
relation.

The weight of non-capitalist activity in capitalist society is (among other
things) one of the reasons there cannot be a "science" of economics.

I'm breaking off here, since Chris's reference to Marx on crime led to a
fascinating lbo thread that I am still studying.

Carrol