File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9707, message 30


Date: Wed, 23 Jul 1997 22:31:39 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Info Revolution


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





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