Re: Productive labour - reply to Jim

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

Sorry about not responding to this right away (especially when it is addressed to me personally). I'm very busy. Further, to be frank, I find your e-mails to be off-putting, Jurriaan. They're much too long for me these days and too frequent (and I say this in full knowledge that I've posted too many long ones myself -- I've reformed) while they often bring in stuff (such as sex) that seems totally irrelevant to the subject at hand. I want to respond to your e-mails, but then they pile up in my in-box and then I stop reading them altogether and then I decide that there's no point because they've been sitting around for too long and everyone's forgotten them or stopped caring. 

RESPONSE: I had written "The question is whether Marx's concept is _useful_ for understanding the
world. I'm not convinced that it is. My presumption is that it isn't."

In general, I agree with Jurriaan's response. The only disagreement is about what I meant by "understanding." 

I think that the concept of productive/unproductive spending is pretty clear and can be operationalized in empirical research. (It's similar to the distinction between investment and consumption in this way. That commonly-used distinction also has many elements of vagueness, shades of gray.)  I think that there's a big difference between the micro-level phenomenon of profitable expenditure and the macro (societal) level phenomenon of productive expenditure. The likely contradiction between these -- a version of micro vs. macro rationality -- hasn't been developed theoretically, however. 

However, though the concept of (un)productive expenditure gives us some ideas about the structure of capitalism, it doesn't seem relevant to crucial matters such as the calculation of the rate of profit. Unproductive expenditure should be counted as part of _costs_ (with constant capital or the wages of productive labor) not as part of surplus-value. The Tonak/Shaikh method of putting unproductive expenditure in the numerator of the rate of profit makes no sense to me. 

------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine

Jurriaan's original message:


"The question is whether Marx's concept is _useful_ for understanding the
world. I'm not convinced that it is. My presumption is that it isn't."

Well, I didn't have much success today myself, but at least I tracked down
something I lost. But just a quick comment on the conceptual issue: I think
a concept of productive labour is necessarily implied by Marx through the
distinction between newly created value and conserved value, thus, the
distinction pertains to that labour which creates new, additional value, and
labour which only conserves or circulates value, and the relationship
between those. Thus, the concept of productive labour also has implications
for the boundaries of the sphere of production itself, and the boundaries of
commodity production, what the attributes of a commodity are as an object
which can satisfy a human need, to which private property rights can be
attached and exchanged. In this context, Ernest Mandel referred to a number
of necessary distinctions that ought to be made, required to understand the
historical evolution of the capitalist mode of production and the
specifically capitalist division of labour:

- commodity production versus other production
- production versus circulation (exchange) and consumption
- material (tangible) production versus non-material production
- production of use-values and production of exchange-values
- production of value and creation of revenue (refer his brief discussion in
the introduction of Cap. Vol 2, Penguin edition).

We could add to this nowadays, the distinction between relations of
communication and relations of exchange. If, however, we just approach that
problem via a statistical classificatory exercise, we may not solve it
conceptually, it must be understood dynamically, i.e. in movement, i.e. it's
really about the dialectics of use-value and exchange-value, and how this
affects the transformation or modification of the social division of labour
by the specifically capitalist mode of production, and the
output-orientation of the production process.

To give just two examples: (1) if surplus-labour has been performed, but the
output has not been sold, then no surplus-value is realised and therefore,
as far as the owner of capital is concerned, the labour wasn't productive in
any transactional sense; (2) a worker may perform both productive and
non-productive activities in one job. Generally, Marx adopts the criterion
for social accounting purposes, that if a labour function (a task) is itself
unproductive, then if this task, previously shared by many different
workers, becomes the specialised function of one worker who has this as a
job, which helps generate surplus-value for the owner of capital, then the
function itself does not thereby become productive - but whether this
theorem is always correct is a moot point, it must be understood
dialectically, which in a few cases could be very difficult.

The three things to understand about it, I think, are that (1) the concept
of productive labour should not be viewed as static, cut-and-dried, fixed
and eternal, but historically and developmentally, i.e. it is historically
defined according to the real development of the social and technical
division of labour, the real development of real capitalist societies. Only
empirical analysis can reveal what the real magnitudes are and what the
class relationship is. (2) the definition or determination of productive
labour itself is not neutral but subject to a contest between social
classes, and the only "objective" definition, is a definition in terms of
what labour is conducive to the expansion of the capitalist mode of
production as a whole, the expansion of the mass (volume) of surplus-value,
but acquiring precision here requires an empirical analysis. If real
production stagnates while financial claims to the social product multiply,
then you can say that the capitalist mode of production is in decline, but
saying that in itself doesn't of course resolve the conceptual problem. (3)
whether or not labour has been productive or not can really be known only a
posteriori in capitalist society, because the commodity-producing living
labour, in contrast to labour power, is in most cases definitely valued in
the market only after it has been performed when its product (a good or
service) is exchanged and paid for.

Labour-value is "lodged", or as Marx says, crystallised or corporealised, in
commodities which are exchanged for money (a commodity is a tradeable
object, which may be a good or service; in the case of a "true" service, the
production and consumption of the service in Marx's sense are simultaneous),
and thus we must be able to distinguish between the total commodity product,
and financial claims on this product. If we start saying, for example, that
financial claims on the total commodity product are part of the commodity
product, then this just confuses things, because then we conflate financial
claims on material wealth, with the real increase in real material wealth,
we confuse production and exchange. When we seek to establish the real value
of the social product (the value product) in a Marxian sense, we subtract
that labour-time which is performed for the purpose of implementing
transactions that facilitate the circulation and distribution of the
product, and ensuring that those transactions will occur in a regulated way.
This labour is unproductive in the sense that it relates to functions which
have to do purely with (1) the existence of class society, (2) the existence
of (securing) private property relations, (3) financial transactions, (2)
competitive processes.

Generally, the owner of production capital looks at productive labour from
the point of view of whether this labour is an impost on production, a
necessary cost, or a faux frais of production, which does not directly add
value to the commodity product that is the source of surplus-value, or
whether it directly does add value to this tangible output of the
enterprise. This may be difficult to determine by management even at the
enterprise level prior to the payment upon sale of output. But from the
standpoint of society as a whole, from the standpoint of total social
capital, the labour regarded as productive micro-economically may not be
regarded as productive, i.e. a variable capital may be a circulating
constant capital from the social point of view. This much is necessarily
implied by Marx's premiss that no additional value is added through the
process of exchange itself (I'm not talking about physical transportation
and storage of perishables etc. here, just about financial transactions).

>From the point of view of the working class under capitalism, the question
is not whether the labour produces surplus-value or not, it is (1)whether or
not this labour represents a net addition to the tangible material wealth,
which, as we know, has acquired the value form under capitalism, and (2)
whether it is socially useful labour. If the labour just consists in
producing financial claims to products, then whereas micro-economically this
may appear productive, insofar as it generates surplus-value for owners of
capital, it isn't productive from a macro-economic point of view. It's just
that, if the proportion of service labour and financial parasitism grows,
and the sophistication of means of communication increases, then culturally
it becomes much more difficult to make the distinction in a credible and
precise way. Even so, it is perfectly clear in 95% of cases what productive
labour is. In 5% of cases it's a bit blurry.

In a real military war, where the survival of society is at stake, the
dispute is usually resolved jolly quickly, all blurriness vanishes, and the
difference between what is production and what is exchange asserts itself
with a vengeance; people realise jolly quickly that the whole edifice of
financial claims on the tangible social product, and the labour that
specifically maintains these claims, is dependent upon real material
production of tangible goods and services in which value is lodged, and not
vice versa. The uneven development of capitalism on a world scale, producing
extremes in the social division of labour, may mystify this, but a real war
sorts it out the conceptual distinction very quickly.

In a socialist society, the allocation of human labour-time in the economy,
required to sustain and develop human life, would be evaluated and decided
upon according to (1) whether the labour promotes an increase in real
material wealth, (2) whether it is socially useful, and (3) whether it is
ecologically responsible, (4) whether it promotes human satisfaction and
development, and (5) whether it promotes or destroys human health and
wellbeing. But if this is to be done correctly, we cannot just vent
banalities about productive labour, we really need to understand and
separate out empirically those functions in the technical and social
division of labour which are a legacy of capitalist mismanagement, and those
which are genuinely necessary.

Based on these sorts of considerations, I would not throw out the critical
concept of productive and non-productive labour, precisely because it is
part of the critique of capitalism, (1) that it devotes an increasing
portion of labour-time to activities which either do not add to material
wealth, inhibit this, or in fact reduce material wealth (destroy it), and
(2) that it modifies the social and technical division of labour, according
to private profit-oriented conceptions of productive labour, which create
occupations which are technically unnecessary, alienating, harmful or
stultifying for human beings, without being "productive" in any other way
than expanding the volume of surplus-value or maintaining the production of
surplus-value.

Jurriaan