On Friday, November 28, 1997 Doug Henwood wrote,
>Speaking of which [deconstruction], has anyone ever deconstructed the
>productive/unproductive labor binary?
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."
On a fine, early spring day in 1978, I was driving east in a 1970 VW
microbus past the PNE on Hastings Street in Vancouver when it struck me that
the three sentences I just quoted above were without a doubt the most
evocative, paradoxical and -- in a word -- *pregnant* that I had ever read.
Those brief, parenthetical -- almost off hand -- remarks appeared to be a
Rosetta Stone for deciphering the hieroglyphic of capital.
Almost. This particular Rosetta Stone comes with a curse: he who deciphers
the hieroglyphic of capital is condemned thereafter to "speak hieroglyphic".
Regards,
Tom Walker
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