Re: The MIM Debate Reply

[Maoist Internationalist Movement <mim3@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 8 Oct 1995, Chris Burford wrote:

>
> I do think Pat confuses the Marxist use of the word "productive" meaning
> productive of surplus value for the capitalist, with the issue of the
> increased range of commodities in the advanced countries that
> cater for culturally shaped needs of the mind rather than the stomach.
>

Pat for MIM replies: Marx himself tangled with an issue that Chris Burford
says I tangled up.

I have different reasons than Marx for tangling the issue
of an international wage standard (the reproduction of labor-
power) and productive labor. Burford says I confuse the
commodities for the stomach with productive labor. I need to
do that because I need to discuss the different economic
components that make up the labor aristocracy.

Yet according to Marx, even in his day, there is a limit to how far luxury
consumption can go, anyway.

"A great part of the annual product which is consumed as income and no
longer returns to production as means of production consists of the most
nefarious products (use-values), satisfying the most unhealthy
envies and caprices. However that may be, their content is
completely indifferent as regards determining productive labour."

[Thus far this is what Chris is saying.]

"(It is obvious, however, that if a disproportionate part was consumed
in this way, at the expense of the means of production and
subsistence which enter into the reproduction whether of goods
or of the labour force, the development of wealth would suffer
a stoppage)."

[Here I say that we need only remember the starving superexploited
workers of the Third World.]

"Here are some comments in advance about this subject: current
economics is incapable of saying anything sensible whatever--
even from the capitalist point of view--on the limits of
the production of luxury products. . . .

"For the workers, this productive labour is, like any other,
the sole means of which he disposes to reproduce his
necessary means of subsistence. For his capitalist,
who is indifferent to the nature of use-value and to the character
of utilized concrete labour, it is only a means of coining money and of
producing surplus value."

(Karl Marx, "Results of the Immediate Process of Production,"
Karl Marx Selected Writings, David McLellan ed. Oxford U. Press, 1977),
p. 514.

Hence, there are different class views of productive labor.
A socialist vision entails the necessary means of subsistence
first.



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