On Wed, Feb 8, 2017 at 6:57 AM, Chris Sturr <sturr at dollarsandsense.org> wrote:
> >
> > Message: 3
> > Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2017 08:18:26 +1100
> > From: Bill Bartlett <william7 at aapt.net.au>
> > Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Petty Bourgeois (was "Big Business Takes
> > Distance... ")
> > To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> > Message-ID: <50718BCA-F0B8-4910-949F-2DCEC9693E8C at aapt.net.au>
> > Content-Type: text/plain; charset=windows-1252
> >
> >
> > On 03/02/2017, at 4:13 AM, Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
> >
> > > But teaching clearly does not create value (in the Marxist sense of
> > "value." [?]
> >
> > Well I'm no Marxist scholar, but I would have thought it was obvious that
> > education increases the productive capacity of the worker dramatically.
> So
> > it is part of the production process, that eventually creates value. It
> > follows that you must be wrong.
> >
> > If Marx agrees with you, then Marx must also be wrong, but not having
> > sufficient education in the intricacies of Marx's theories, my opinion on
> > that matter is of less "value".
> >
> > Bill Bartlett
> > Bracknell Tas
> >
>
> Hey Bill and Carrol and everyone,
>
> I think it's that Marx didn't consider services to be productive labor, but
> he should have. There's the famous passage from *Theories of Surplus Value*
> in which Marx facetiously claims that crime is productive:
>
> "A philosopher produces ideas, a poet verse, a parson sermons, a professor
> text-books, etc. A criminal produces crime. But if the relationship between
> this latter branch of production and the whole productive activity of
> society is examined a little more closely one is forced to abandon a number
> of prejudices. The criminal produces not only crime but also the criminal
> law; he produces the professor who delivers lectures on this criminal law,
> and even the inevitable text-book in which the professor presents his
> lectures as a commodity for sale in the market. There results an increase
> in material wealth, quite apart from the pleasure which...the author
> himself derives from the manuscript of this text-book."
>
> But my understanding is that that this is supposed to be a reductio ad
> absurdum. I'm no Marx expert either, but I think Marxist economists today
> *do
> *think that services (including teaching) produce value.
>
> When I was looking for this passage, I noticed that Yoshie Furuhashi quoted
> it at more length on lbo-talk back in 1999:
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/1999/1999-March/004381.html. The longer
> version
> is worth reading.
>
> Chris
>
> --
> Chris Sturr, Co-editor
> *Dollars & Sense* | Real World Economics | Triple Crisis Blog
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