[Marxism] Productive Labor

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

I'm not sure that my comments are all that productive really :-)

Marx discusses the concept of PUPL mainly in TSV, Grundrisse, Capital II,
III, I and the manuscript Results of the Immediate Process of Production.
However, he never completed his discussion of relations of distribution nor
did he finally resolve the question of productive labor precisely. Not all
his remarks are consistent.

The basic inconsistency in Marx's texts is (1) between micro and macro -
labor which appears productive at the level of the enterprise (because
profit generating) is not regarded as productive from a macro perspective
(because transferring, rather than producing capital value), i.e. from the
point of view of social reproduction as a whole. Thus a capital which
appears to be variable capital at the micro level really functions as a
constant circulating capital at the macro level, insofar as it does not add
net new value itself. (2) between the idea that the definition is purely
social-institutional and the idea that the intrinsic nature of the activity
or its output is a criterion for the definition. As regards the latter, it
seems Marx wanted to argue that some activities in civil society are by
nature always non-productive, i.e. the existence of social classes gives
rise to activities which are necessary for social reproduction but
unproductive in function.

The conclusion reached in Cap. Vol. 1 is as follows:

"That labourer alone is productive, who produces surplus-value for the
capitalist, and thus works for the self-expansion of capital. If we may take
an example from outside the sphere of production of material objects, a
schoolmaster is a productive labourer, when, in addition to belabouring the
heads of his scholars, he works like a horse to enrich the school
proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching factory,
instead of in a sausage factory, does not alter the relation. Hence the
notion of a productive labourer implies not merely a relation between work
and useful effect, between labourer and product of labour, but also a
specific, social relation of production, a relation that has sprung up
historically and stamps the labourer as the direct means of creating
surplus-value. To be a productive labourer is, therefore, not a piece of
luck, but a misfortune."
http://www.econlib.org/library/YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA16.html

Marx does suggest here that "a relation between work and useful effect"
enters the definition of productive labour. But the point seems to be that
this relation must be of a type, that enables surplus-value to be
appropriated from the process.

Compare this with:

"A schoolmaster who educates others is not a productive worker. But a
schoolmaster who is engaged as a wage labourer in an institution along with
others, in order through his labour to valorise the money of the
entrepreneur of the knowledge-mongering institution, is a productive worker.
Yet most of these kinds of work, from the formal point of view, are hardly
subsumed formally under capital. They belong rather among the transitional
forms."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/economic/ch02b.htm

Modern national accounts rest on the assumption that anything defined as
production adds value to the gross product, and production is broadly
defined as resident institutional units which apply factors of production to
transform inputs into outputs. Effectively that includes the bulk of
income-generating activities, regardless of institutional or property
relations (i.e. both market and non-market production).

The quote Carrol requested:

"The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many
determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of
thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a
point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and
hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and
conception. Along the first path the full conception was evaporated to yield
an abstract determination; along the second, the abstract determinations
lead towards a reproduction of the concrete by way of thought. In this way
Hegel fell into the illusion of conceiving the real as the product of
thought concentrating itself, probing its own depths, and unfolding itself
out of itself, by itself, whereas the method of rising from the abstract to
the concrete is only the way in which thought appropriates the concrete,
reproduces it as the concrete in the mind. But this is by no means the
process by which the concrete itself comes into being."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

Clearly then Marx suggests that the process of abstraction ought to occur
through appropriating the empirical material in thought, guided perhaps by
theoretical suppositions, rather than superimposing abstractions on the
empiria or finding analogies between abstractions and the empiria. That is,
the abstractive process abstracts from a real (empirical) object.

As regards the specialisation of productive and non-productive functions, I
don't have my old Penguin edition of Cap. Vol 2 handy, and the Moscow
edition I have here doesn't have a very good index. But Marx does make a
point in Cap Vol. 2 along the lines I paraphrased, and from memory E. Mandel
refers to it specifically, in his intro to Cap. Vol 2, section on productive
labour (penguin ed). You could look it up there. From memory, the passage
occurs in chapter 4, but I could be wrong. Mandel from memory cites the same
in his discussion of the topic in his chapter on the services sector in Late
Capitalism (where he advances a rather Smithian concept of productive labor,
as Alvater puts it).

Clearly though the boundaries of productive labor are historically
contingent and changeable, the reason being that the possibilities for
transforming outputs of human labor into commodities depends on prevailing
property relations, the evolution of the division of labor, and on
technological inventions. Things which could not be commodities at one time,
can become commodities another time because of changes in property relations
and/or technological innovations. Think for example of trading in pollution
quota's or futures (although these could be called notional or
pseudo-commodities) or more substantively, information and communication
services.

Jurriaan



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