Date: Fri, 25 Jul 1997 10:05:27 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Re: Info Revolution


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).

2 Cultural labour

I can only refer again to Theories of Surplus Value I, ch 4, where this is
dealt with. If the cultural (and knowledge) production is organized by a
capitalist, and the product is produced by wage-slaves and marketed as a
commodity, with quantifiable time input, then it's in the system, and the
labour expended on it is productive.

It needs repeating ad nauseam that the productive here means productive of
surplus value.

There are huge problems of control here. Not so much of the time put in by
the cultural or knowledge workers (or any other kind of traditionally
service workers, say masseurs, we choose to include in this kind of
production), since the measurement of time input is something capitalists
can do in their sleep, but of the product itself. We're into something
Walter Benjamin raised in his essay on the work of art in the era of mass
reproduction. The really explosive element in the relationship between this
kind of labour and the market is the fact that the product is often
infinitely reproducible. This does not apply to direct physical
performances (sweat and flesh) such as someone singing live or massaging
live or doing anything at all live which is quantified by time and marketed
as a commodity, which may have an element of natural uniqueness about it.
It does apply to things that are packaged on reproducible media, however,
such as software, recorded performances, etc.

So, as society gets more and more socialized, and the production of
knowledge, culture etc gets more and more reproducible and easy to
disseminate, the capitalist relations of production make it more and more
necessary to limit and cramp and monopolize and chain down the very
products capitalism claims to have universalized. Hence the efforts of
Microsoft etc against software "piracy", hence the boom in the use of
patents  and all the agonized discussions about intellectual etc property
rights.

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






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