Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 23:10:12 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: M-FEM: productive and unproductive labor


We had a little discussion on the Marxism-Thaxis list about the
productive/unproductive labor distinction, and I thought that the
theoretically-minded among M-Fem subscribers might be interested in the
subject, so I decided to forward the thread. (I may have lost a post or two
in it.) The sentences that do not concern the topic are edited out.

Yoshie

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Date: Tue, 22 Jul 1997 19:49:28 -0500
To: marxism-thaxis-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Info Revolution

>Since we're on the unproductive/productive distinction, can someone please
>tell me why it matters so much?
>
>
>Doug

I would say it matters in (at least) three areas of ideological and
political struggles: 1) gender questions; 2) struggles against populism;
and 3) the place of "knowledge" and "knowledge workers" in capitalist
ideologies and Marxist analyses.

A larger number of women than men perform unproductive labor at home
and workplaces. How Marxists theorize the relations between unproductive
labor and productive labor makes a difference in what places women occupy in
Marxist theory and praxis.

Populist ideology targets those who are considered unproductive as
enemies: financial capitalists; government workers; those who are on publisc
assistance; and intellectual workers. Marxists should provide clear
analyses of unproductive workers that would not feed populist
ressentiment.

Marxists should battle against the capitalist ideologues who displace the
category of labor by positing knowledge as the main source of surplus
value while at the same time arguing against those who do not think of
knowledge
production as labor.

Yoshie

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Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 19:47:10 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>

James writes:
>A good question, that often gets the wrong answer. The example has
>already been raised of the feminist objection to the categorisation
>which confuses Marx's analytic category 'productive labour' with a
>moralistic denunciation of 'unproductive' domestic work - needless to
>say, Marx meant no such thing.
>
>The importance of the distinction has nothing to do with the usefulness
>of labour for mankind in general. Rather it characterises such labour as
>is productive of surplus value for capital. The importance of that
>distinction is that surplus value, arising out of exploitation, is the
>basis of new capital accumulation, and therefore of the reproduction of
>the capitalist social relation.
>
>Capital has a contradictory tendency both to expel labour from
>productive employment and to draw it in. Reducing costs makes immediate
>sense, but in the long run, only productive labour is a source of new
>value. The growth of unproductive labour (Marx uses the example of the
>growinbg numbers of domestic servants in his own day, we might refer to
>the growth of public sector workers) is indicative of a sclerotic trend
>in capitalist accumulation. No moral judgements of the workers involved
>follow, but their numerical growth does tell us something about the
>over-mature economies that have reduced the relative number of
>productive workers.
>
>On a small point about the productivity of domestic work: The feminist
>critique of the characterisation of domestic work as unproductive leadds
>to the political demand that such work be reckoned as a part of GDP -
>especially in third world countries. Doubtless this would produce some
>interesting statistics, but it would also obscure the facts about how
>productive a country was in value terms - which remain important for as
>long as we live under the market. More to the point, though, it seems an
>inadequate response to the penury of isolating domestic drudgery to
>'value' it morally, when in economic terms it has no recompense.

The distinction between a marxist category of unproductive labor and
moralistic denunciations of unproductive labor in common sense use is an
important one. But feminist works that I am aware of made a different
argument. Unproductive labor performed by women facilitates the
reproduction of labor power, thus though invisible, it is a factor in
making productive labor indeed productive.

Yoshie

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Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 20:32:51 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

>Unproductive labor performed by women facilitates the
>reproduction of labor power, thus though invisible, it is a factor in
>making productive labor indeed productive.

Shaikh & Tonak include household labor as productive in their schema.
While the moral/philosophical point of this is clear, it seems a nightmare
to try to impute monetary value to it - not just in the technical sense,
but in
the sense that household life is ruled by things other than money and
competitive markets.

Doug

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Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 21:14:57 -0500
From: Yoshie Furuhashi <Furuhashi.1-AT-osu.edu>

Doug wrote:
>Shaikh & Tonak include household labor as productive in their schema. While
>the moral/philosophical point of this is clear, it seems a nightmare to try
>to impute monetary value to it - not just in the technical sense, but in
>the sense that household life is ruled by things other than money and
>competitive markets.

I agree that we can't and probably shouldn't even try to compute actual
monetary value of household labor. At least I don't see much point in such
a practice. But I think that we shouldn't regard it as simply part of
"externalities"; instead, we could think of it as part of invisible
labor--including emotional labor--that makes productive labor and the
workings of the market possible. So in my opinion, theorizing the
relationships between productive and unproductive labor matters when we
analyze capitalism as an ensemble of changing social relations that
reproduce it, even though such theorizing doesn't fit into the production
of statistics.

Yoshie

*********************************************
Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 22:31:39 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>

Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:

>I agree that we can't and probably shouldn't even try to compute actual
>monetary value of household labor. At least I don't see much point in such
>a practice. But I think that we shouldn't regard it as simply part of
>"externalities"; instead, we could think of it as part of invisible
>labor--including emotional labor--that makes productive labor and the
>workings of the market possible. So in my opinion, theorizing the
>relationships between productive and unproductive labor matters when we
>analyze capitalism as an ensemble of changing social relations that
>reproduce it, even though such theorizing doesn't fit into the production
>of statistics.

This touches on what Jim O'Connor calls the second contradiction of
capitalism - K'ism's dependence on natural/environmental and social
structures that it disturbs so immensely. Jim, I think, is trying to
develop a new theory of catastrophic crisis, and I'm allergic to crisis
theories, but it's essential to think through the consequences of this 2nd
contradiction.

Doug

**********************************************
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 10:05:27 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>

There's been a lot of toing and froing about whether domestic labour and
cultural labour can be regarded as productive or not, and if so, whether it
really matters.

1 Domestic labour

What this boils down to is whether the labour concerned goes to produce,
maintain and reproduce the commodity labour-power or not. If it does, it's
part of the productive process creating variable capital, and as such
contributes value to the commodity.

As everybody should know, the value added to commodities is not directly
reflected in their prices, which are distorted by the effects of the
equalized rate of profit, monopoly pressure, political pressure (an adjunct
to monopoly pressure), etc. Two things are important here:

First, if the necessary costs of production aren't covered, the production
doesn't get done, the commodity isn't produced or is not up to standard.
With respect to labour-power this means people (the owners and bearers
of labour-power) die or can't perform the labour required of them. This is a
limit on the desire of capitalists to dispense with all workers of course,
the limit being the necessity to keep alive and keep reproducing a
sufficient supply of labour power to produce the profit necessary for
maintaining the capitalists at the standard to which they are accustomed.

Second, it doesn't matter how you twist or turn with the technicalities of
price, value, the labour process etc, these basics have got to be covered.
However indirect the passing of value to the producers of labour-power, it
has to get done. However tortuous the mechanisms of price, institution,
etc, those who add value to the commodity labour-power in the capitalist
mode of production *must* receive the minimal cost of maintaining their
own labour-power, or they will not be able to continue their work.

Which all means that under capitalism, health and education workers
(say) involved in the production of labour-power (variable capital), are
productive of value, even if the non-capitalist organization of some of
this (public sector schools and health services) leads to distortions in
the calculation of pricing and costing etc. These "services" are not the
same as the services of the private servants Marx discusses in Theories of
Surplus Value. For those who can't bring themselves to acknowledge these
producers of commodities as productive workers, there's always the
semi-cop-out of calling them "service workers".

Remember all the time that our present imperialist stage of the capitalist
mode of production is so thoroughly socialized and planned behind the backs
of the actors in it and the relations of production, that this kind of
socialization of the production of the commodity labour-power under
capitalist appearances is the "natural" development. The Thatcherite model
of back to private production for everything is destructive of the social
need for skilled, healthy labour-power.

All this argument applies with even more indirectness and pricing
distortions etc to the unpaid labour of women at home. If value isn't
passed on to the woman at  home in one form or another (a man's wage
packet handed over, government handouts, whatever), she dies or
deteriorates and
the work she is required to do perfecting the commodity labour-power
doesn't get done.

At the same time as it is absolutely necessary (Carroll I think it was
referred to Marx's Wages, Price and Profit, not an early work at all in
fact, where this is made very clear) all struggle for merely keeping a
worker alive ("decent wages, viable levels of welfare, etc) is part and
parcel of the everyday battle under capitalism to determine the current
value of the commodity labour-power in the market. The struggle for
socialism is to eliminate this demeaning and repetitive ritual of wage
slavery (or worse for those more indirectly connected to the system).

<snip>

3 Does it really matter

To round off for now, I would like to rub everyone's noses in the fact that
this huge and visible contradiction in modern capitalist production, in the
world-wide transnationalized globalizationized ballyhoo  of the
"disappearance of the nation-state" in fact requires a stronger
nation-state than ever to police it. I mean, who could have tried to put
pressure on the Chinese government about software production if it hadn't
been the US imperialist government?? Who will actually enforce the
patents that all these companies have been taking out to slow the speed of
intellectual, cultural and scientific interchange and development??

Also, given the above arguments it becomes obvious that an understanding
of Marx's distinction between productive and unproductive labour helps us
understand what's going on in modern society with the growth of the public
sector (socialization of the production of labour-power), the attacks on
the public sector (primitive reactions against the mode of production
developing behind the backs of capitalist production relations and
threatening them), the apparent paradox's of cultural production and
perhaps above all the fact that so-called "services" are in fact
commodities a lot of the time and being pooled into the social aggregate of
value that is used to keep up the rate of profit when the value being
produced in more highly capitalized sectors is shrinking and can't be used
for keeping anything up.

In conclusion it should be obvious that none of this holds if the labour
theory of value is rejected. But if you do reject it, then you're back in
the morass with all the bourgeois economists. Glug, glug ...

Cheers,

Hugh

******************************************
Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 12:47:38 +0100
From: James Heartfield <James-AT-heartfield.demon.co.uk>

In message <l03020901affdff5c7156-AT-[130.244.77.88]>, Hugh Rodwell
<m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se> writes
>There's been a lot of toing and froing about whether domestic labour and
>cultural labour can be regarded as productive or not, and if so, whether it
>really matters.
>
>1 Domestic labour

>
>First, if the necessary costs of production aren't covered, the production
>doesn't get done, the commodity isn't produced or is not up to standard.
>With respect to labour-power this means people (the owners and bearers of
>labour-power) die or can't perform the labour required of them. This is a
>limit on the desire of capitalists to dispense with all workers of course,
>the limit being the necessity to keep alive and keep reproducing a
>sufficient supply of labour power to produce the profit necessary for
>maintaining the capitalists at the standard to which they are accustomed.

Marx mooted a family wage. ie that the raising of the next generation of
workers and the daily reproduction of the wage labourer would be
represented in the wage, meaning that the costs of maintaining a family
would be an ordinary part of the value of labour power. Historically
that family wage was something that arose out of a profound social
conflict and legal intervention into the family (to exclude women and
children from the workforce, make schooling compulsory and so on). In
recent years in Britain and the US the family wage has been undermined
(witness the growth of 'work-rich' families struggling to maintain
living standards).

>
>Second, it doesn't matter how you twist or turn with the technicalities of
>price, value, the labour process etc, these basics have got to be covered.
>However indirect the passing of value to the producers of labour-power, it
>has to get done. However tortuous the mechanisms of price, institution,
>etc, those who add value to the commodity labour-power in the capitalist
>mode of production *must* receive the minimal cost of maintaining their own
>labour-power, or they will not be able to continue their work.

This is a confusion of use-value and exchange value, surely. Domestic
work contributes to the use-value of the commodity labour power - but
since no exchange relationship exists between man and wife that work
will never be reckoned in exchange value.

This distinction might seem pedantic but it does have serious
consequences. The most profound is that domestic work in capitalist
societies remains privatised, isolating domestic workers from wider
society. Arising out of that, there is no inherent tendency to raise
productivity in the sphere of domestic work - despite some trivial
labour saving devices, this remains a world of drudgery. Finally, the
persistence of this unsocialised and unrewarded work is the material
basis of women's oppression, excluding them from equal status in
society.

<snip>

James Heartfield