Re: productive labour - addition

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

this concept isn't unique to Uno. 

in the very unproductive literature on (un)productive labor, there's a commonly-used (but seldomly-discussed) distinction between

1. useful labor -- labor that produces use-values. This is truly transhistorical.
2. surplus-productive labor -- the kind that Uno refers to below. It's any labor that causes a surplus-product to arise. This is transhistorical amongst class societies. 
3. productive labor under commodity production, which produces value. 
4. (capitalist) productive labor, which produces surplus-value.

In the non-Marxian tradition, there's also normatively productive labor (which is good) vs. unproductive labor (which is bad). 
------------------------
Jim Devine jdevine@xxxxxxx &  http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine




> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jurriaan Bendien [mailto:bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx]
> Sent: Friday, December 05, 2003 5:16 PM
> To: PEN-L@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: [PEN-L] productive labour - addition
> 
> 
> Kozo Uno makes the additional point that work is not 
> "naturally productive",
> both in the sense that it takes work to make work productive, and that
> productive work depends on tools and techniques to be 
> productive. Thus, he
> seeks to distinguish between a transhistorical concept of 
> productive labour,
> and a specifically capitalist concept of productive labour. The
> transhistorical concept is that the producer must be able to create a
> product larger than is required to sustain and reproduce the 
> labour-power of
> that producer over time, i.e. a magnitude greater than the 
> equivalent of his
> means of subsistence. The specifically capitalist concept is 
> that the work
> creates surplus-value which is privately appropriated upon 
> realisation in
> exchange. The two may not imply each other; thus, in the case of slave
> labour, forced labour or super-exploitation, the producer 
> becomes expendable
> in the relentless pursuit of surplus-value (cf. the history 
> of Bolivia).
> 
> Reference: Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy 
> (Harvester Press).
> Thomas Sekine explicates the concept in a useful note.
> 
> J.
>