It is indeed a cul-de-sac but it is important to understand why. The productive/unproductive labor distinction relies on a boundary that desolves when you try to examine it closely. That elusive boundary, though, is a projection of the fetishism of commodities. It only makes sense, at a distance, with regard to "relationships between things" but if you want to pursue the distinction you are eventually forced to consider relationships between people.
I would say that the theoretical value of the category of unproductive labor is to reintroduce the concept of fetishism of commodities at a later stage of the analysis of the logic of capital thus reaffirming that capital(ism) can never stand on the ground of its own logic but ultimately is founded on, masks and reproduces structures of political domination. This value of the concept of unproductive labor, in my opinion, is more clearly developed in Dilke's pamphlet, "The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties..." One might say, at the risk of offending Marxists, that it is actually the exhaustive analysis of the "laws of motion" of capital that is the cul-de-sac (albeit an analytically "productive" one). On 6/7/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I'm afraid that the whole discussion of unproductive labor in Marx is a cul-de-sac. Unproductive labor doesn't produce surplus-value directly. But that nice certainty goes away when "indirectly productive" labor (cf. Jim O'Connor) is introduced. It's also unclear what the theoretical use of unproductive labor is...
-- Sandwichman
