Re: Productive/Unproductive Labour

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

Marx wasn't very clear about his purposes in CAPITAL (and the THEORIES OF SURPLUS VALUE), beyond the general purpose of limning the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production. I don't know what his purpose in developing the concepts of (un)productive labor was. To some extent, he was simply responding to Ricardo's and Smith's concepts: he was developing a "law of value" in response to their labor theories of value and since they -- and other classical economists -- talked about (un)productive labor, he had to do so too, within the context of his "law of value."
Jim

	-----Original Message----- 
	From: Carrol Cox [mailto:cbcox@xxxxxxxxx] 
	

	I wonder if everyone (on both sides) responding to this topic (not only
	in this thread, but in published works on the topic) is not assuming
	that Marx in his stumblings around this issue was trying to answer the
	same questions that "economists" try to answer.