Re: [Marxism] Productive and Unproductive Labour

[ertugrul ahmet tonak <eatonak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Julio, thanks for your appreciation and commentary.  As we (Sungur and
I) reflect on your general comment on the "non-economic or direct
appropriation or transfer of existing income/capital" issue, I should
point out that we already explicitly stated that tax collection involves
the expenditure of labor and classified the latter type of labor within
the activities of social reproduction.  See below quote from our article
on this point:



"Now it is clear that at least in the modern era a certain part of the
agents who carry out these activities of circulation and of the
reproduction of the social order are involved with labour of a specific
kind. The public employee working for the tax administration or for
local government, the bank clerk, the employee of an insurance company,
to bring up the most obvious examples, no less toil away their working
day than an industrial or agricultural worker. However, the labour
expended by the former is of a different nature when compared with that
expended by the latter..."

Ahmet

Julio Huato wrote:
> I'd like to second Philip Ferguson's endorsement of E. Ahmet Tonak &
> Sungur Savran's "Productive and unproductive labour: an attempt at
> clarification and classification," Capital & Class No. 68 (Summer 1999)
> p. 113-52.  Even those mildly interested in critical political economy
> should get acquainted with the general aspects of this discussion.  And
> Ahmet & Sungur's piece focuses precisely on those general aspects.
>
> That said, I'd like to point to an omission that, IMO, is key -- even at
> the level of abstraction and generality that Ahmet & Sungur conduct
> their discussion.  In the section on "productive labor in general,"
> Ahmet & Sungur wrote:
>
> > There are certain activities which, whatever the historical form of
> > social organization, have to be carried out in order to assure
> > biological and social reproduction of the members of society and of
> > the socio-economic formation itself. The definition of productive
> > labour in general presupposes a careful distinction among the
> > different types of such activities. The basic set of activities, which
> > all (or in some cases most) societies have to carry out are the
> > following: production, circulation, distribution of the product
> > (so-called 'income distribution ), personal and social consumption,
> > and the reproduction of the social order.
>
>
> The latter is the transcription of a list of activities included by Marx
> in, say, the Grundrisse: production, consumption, circulation, and
> distribution.  The authors examine whether these activities involve the
> deployment of labor and, in particular, productive labor.  Well, this
> list only includes the activities classical political economists focused
> on.  In the Grundrisse notebook where Marx reproduces this list, he
> seems to be making critical remarks on the claims of classical political
> economists and not stating his own positive results.  In any case, I
> don't think it is meant as an exhaustive list of the broad activities
> undertaken in old or modern capitalist societies.
>
> Note that, as Ahmet & Sungur say, distribution is merely meant to refer
> narrowly to "income distribution," which -- as Marx points out in
> several passages in Grundrisse and Capital -- is the correlate of a
> logically prior distribution: the distribution of the ownership of the
> conditions of production or, in modern conventional terms, the
> distribution of wealth (physical and human).  Ahmet & Sungur indicate
> that the activity of distribution doesn't require the use of labor.  So,
> apparently, the characteristic of these activities is that they all
> *assume* that the only way somebody can appropriate commodities is by
> means of exchange.
>
> An activity ommitted in this list is non-economic or direct
> appropriation or transfer of existing income/capital  (and wealth in
> general).  And direct appropriation does usually involve the expenditure
> of large amounts of labor.  One form of direct appropropriation is
> taxation, conducted under the rule of law.  There's an army of state
> employees to ensure this transfer.  Other forms are conducted outside of
> the law or at least in murky spaces.  One of these forms is
> prevarication, or the private appropriation of pieces of the public
> treasury.  In the U.S. only there's an army of PR people and lobbyists
> to ensure this.  As a handy example, Jim Surowiecki recently reported in
> the New Yorker that the large media networks were engaged in a
> large-scale lobbying effort in Washington to steal whole ranges of the
> electromagnetic spectrum that are by law regarded a part of the public
> treasury.  According to Surowiecki, this piece of the public treasury is
> worth "hundreds of millions of dollars."
>
> And internationally, another significant form of direct appropriation is
> imperialism proper.  And there are, in this case literally, *armies* of
> people deployed to ensure the takeover of wealth at an international
> scale.  Obviously, the labor spent in this reshuffling of existing
> wealth is NOT productive labor.
>
> [By the way, I don't think that Ahmet & Sungur meant to subsume direct
> appropriation under the rubric of "social consumption."   That would
> have been conceptually correct, but they clearly state that consumption
> in general doesn't involve the expenditure of labor.  Direct
> appropriation does involve it though.]
>
> Julio
>
>
>
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--


I was recently asked whether universities should teach
values.  My response was that universities, whether
implicitly or otherwise, always, always teach values.
They teach values in the way they hire and treat employees.

Ruth Simmons
President, Brown University

------------------------------------------
E. Ahmet Tonak
Simon’s Rock College of Bard
Great Barrington, MA 01230

Phone:  413-528 7488
Fax:    413-528 7365
Cell:   413-329 7856

Homepage: www.simons-rock.edu/~eatonak


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