[Marxism] Productive labor (was Marx on management)

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Basically I am not interested all that much in the whole debate about the
productive-unproductive labor distinction. More important is the distinction
between income from work and income from property. It depends really what
you intend by making the distinction, what you think hinges on it.

I think what Marx substantively aimed for is to understand the law of motion
of the capitalist division of labor (although he doesn't develop this in
detail), and his argument as I understand it is that, systemically, the
forms of labour are adjusted and reshaped over time to maximise the volume
of surplus-value (profit+interest+rent+tax+royalties) under current
conditions, i.e. a transition from formal to real subsumption of labour by
capital.

The fact that labour is illegal does not necessarily have any relevance for
the PUPL distinction; in the world economy, I guesstimate something like
one-fifth of the value of all production occurs in "grey" or "black"
markets. If a protection racket is considered non-productive, it is
presumably because it falls outside the sphere of production, or, at most,
it is an arbitrary impost on production, parasitic on it - a transfer of
revenues.

In the background of the discussion lurks the idea that productive labor, to
be productive, must create some tangible product or transferable
labor-service which represents a net addition to wealth, and is not a
deduction from it. But I think Marx mainly intends that the activity yields
a net addition to the mass of profit available for distribution.

Following Marx's last comments in Cap. Vol. 1, the same activity can be
productive or unproductive from the point of view of the capitalist system,
depending on whether it is performed for private profit or not. But this
view of the matter does not cohere very well with the concept applied in
Cap. Vol. 2, which suggests that some activities are intrinsically
productive or not productive, and that this fact does not change, if a
component of the labour of many workers becomes the specialised fulltime
occupation of some.

Jurriaan


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