File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9710, message 284


Date: Tue, 14 Oct 1997 11:51:17 -0400
From: james m blaut <70671.2032-AT-CompuServe.COM>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Get back in the kitchen and rattle them pots & pans!


Replying to Jon Flanders.

"I was a lathe operator at one time. The company I worked for was too cheap
to hire laborers to sweep, so we cleaned up after ourselves. If we didn't
we could not have continued "turning" out the parts. So my answer on this
is yes, and I think Marx answered affirmatively as well on this point."

Good. So the janitor is a productive worker, a producer of surplus value.

>>And trickier still: the lathe operator, let us say, produces a finished,
ready-to-sell product. Is the person who passes along the line picking up
these products to take them to wherever they will be packaged and shipped a
productive worker?<<

"Yes again. Parts piling up next to the lathe are quite useless to anyone."

Good. So janitors and workers in transportation -- you'd have to include
truckers and railroadmen -- are productive workers, producers of surplus
value.

"... are you trying to say that a commodity emerges from a complex web of
productive interaction far broader that that three eighths of an inch 
steel ribbon peeling off an hydraulic valve spinning on a lathe?"

YES! YES! YES!

And -- here is heterodoxy for you -- I'd find it hard to come up with a
good ddistinction between prodiuctive and (some) nonproductive workers in
many or most circumstances, and rummaging around in that "complex web of
productive inerations" I'd probably have a hard time distinguishing
processes that we ordinarily call production from those we ordinarily call
ezxchange. This is one of the great fallacies of the Brenners and Laclaus
who sneer at Third World workers (past and present) and say "oh, they are
not producing surplus value -- its just exchange, not production, and
cannot influence the trajectory of capitalism." Ask a Hawaiian cane-cutter
if he or she is engaged in excgange, not production.

Away with all economism!

Jim Blaut


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