Date: Wed, 1 May 1996 12:20:16 -0800
To: marxism-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (rakesh bhandari)
Subject: Re: Unproductive labor


I have not yet carefully read all the messages on this topic.  A few quick
points.

1. Marx does not use the industrial/service criterion in order to
differentiate productive from unproductive labor. I think I agree with both
Jerry and Hugh on this.  Carchedi from whom I quoted certainly does not use
this criterion.  I used 'services' (I beliveve) as a short-hand for
unproductive labor; this was a blunder.

2.  Reading over vol III, it is clear that Marx is not interested in
*fixing the definition* of productive and unproductive labor but in
studying the changing  relations in the course of accumulation between
industrial capital on the one hand and circulation costs, merchants'
capital and interest-bearing capital on the other hand.  Marx's definitions
are always dynamic. 

3. Marx does analyze how by reducing turn-over time, merchants' capital can
act as a *productive force*, yet he also insists that merchants capital is
not productive of additional value. 

4. I am trying to locate this passage from Vol III quoted in Sydney
Coontz's Productive Labor and Effective Demand, including a critique of
Keynesianism:

"For this reason, the industrial capitalist endeavors to limit these
expenses of circulation to a minimum jsut as he does with expenss on
constant capital. Hence industrial capital does not maintain the same
relation to its commercial wage laborers that it does to its productive
laborers. The greater the number of productive wage laborers employed under
otherwise equal circumstances the more voluminous is production, the
greater the surplus value or profit....The commercial laborers does produce
surplus value directly...He adds to the income of the capitalist, not by
creating any surplus value but by helping him reduce the costs of the
realization of surplus value. " 

5. Fred Moseley's book includes a discussion of this debate with
bibliographic references.

Rakesh



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