>On Friday, November 28, 1997 Doug Henwood wrote,
>>Speaking of which [deconstruction], has anyone ever deconstructed the
>>productive/unproductive labor binary?
Tom answers:
>Yes and No. Marx half deconstructed the binary in "The Results of the
>Immediate Process of Production". The section in which he did so was
>fittingly titled "Productive and Unproductive Labour" (See pages 1038-1049
>of the 1977 Vintage edition of Capital vol. 1).
>
>At the end of the section on productive and unproductive labour, Marx
>remarks that, "(As the director of the labour process the capitalist
>performs *productive labour* [emphasis in original] in the sense that his
>labour is involved in the total process that is realized in the product). We
>are concerned here only with capital within the immediate process of
>production. The other functions of capital and the agents which it employs
>within them form a subject to be left for later."
>
>As far as I am aware, NO ONE ELSE has taken up the challenge issued by the
>last sentence. That is, the analysis of the labour process by which the
>other functions *of* capital are subsumed *by* capital remains very much "a
>subject to be left for later."
>
I think Marx is referring to later in CAPITAL, toward the end of vol. III
(which I don't have here so I can't cite it exactly). He talks about how the
capitalist is important to the process of production as a director rather
than simply as an owner. But then he notes that the worker-owned factories
of this day (for which he had a different term, something like "cooperative
factories") showed that the capitalist-as-director was unnecessary. So the
"productive" function of the capitalist was a result of ownership -- rather
than the ownership being a result of the productive function (as capital's
apologists see it).
It should be noted, of course, that capital's direction of production
involves different goals than a workers' democratic direction would. The
capitalist aims to turn his or her despotism in production into
surplus-value, whereas the cooperative has democratically-decided and thus
more complex goals. Further, for Marx, the notion of "productive" labor is
linked to capital's viewpoint: productive labor _produces_ surplus-value
(and thus allows the appropriation of profits, interest, & rent). So the
role of the capitalist director as "productive" is justified totally in
capitalist terms, even if there is no justification when we look at it from
a more objective viewpoint.
in pen-l solidarity,
Jim Devine
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://clawww.lmu.edu/1997F/ECON/jdevine.html
