[gosh... today as I was driving to work, US National Public Radio was saying over and over again that Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead (oops, I mean Abu Musab al-Zarqawi). Don't they realize that such a news approach is self-defeating at best? I for one ended up kept on listening to one song from the Flying Burrito Bros. on CD and then try to see if the al-Zarqawipalooza was over yet ... By the time NPR had finally switched over to the also-overworked story of US/Euro negotiations with Iran about nukes, the FBB had won.]
back to the discussion in progress... me:
> again, I wonder what use all this [the (un)productive labor concept] is?
On 6/7/06, paul phillips wrote:
I have found that the distinction between productive and unproductive labour very useful in understanding/explaining recent (i.e. post 2nd WW) developments within a 'Galbraithian' framework. That is, once you go beyond basic necessities, as Galbraith points out, capitalists find it necessary to 'create' demand. That is, in order to realize surplus value as profits, they must augment demand through advertising, marketing, product design, etc. all of which employs unproductive (in a Marxist sence) labour that does not produce use value or surplus value but merely increases market value/price. But such labour must be paid out of the surplus value created in production. Hence, a growing wedge arises between production productivity and wages of basic producers. This means, of course, that the rate of exploitation of basic producers must increase.
this is very similar to Baran & Sweezy's analysis, too. As with Galbraith's NEW INDUSTRIAL STATE analysis, that analysis was extremely descriptive of (with lots of good insights about) US capitalism at the time, but at the time was not a very good guide to the the future (which we're now living in) or to structural change away from the NEW INDUSTRIAL STATE structure. I think a more Marxian analysis of capital accumulation is useful here... ["We are living in the future / I'll tell you how I know / I read it in the paper / Fifteen years ago / We're all driving rocket ships / And talking with our minds / And wearing turquoise jewelry / And standing in soup lines / We are standing in soup lines" -- John Prine.] Tom Walker adds.
It occurs to me that just as the worker cannot be reduced to mere labor power, the political economy cannot be explained entirely in the workings of the laws [of] accumulation.
Mike Lebowitz's BEYOND CAPITAL (both 1st and 2nd editions) is really good here. As I summarized his analysis once in a book review in MONTHLY REVIEW, Marx's CAPITAL is a bit like Hegel's analysis of the Master/Servant relationship but focuses totally on the Master, i.e., Capital, without dealing with the autonomous dynamics of the Servant, i.e., Labor. So the transition from the 1950s-60s political economy sketched by Galbraith or Baran & Sweezy requires not only a capital-accumulation analysis but also an understandng of labor's side.
There are two overarching dimensions to the political economy, domination and production. And it is crucial that production poses a threat to domination. Therefore waste is essential for preserving domination. It is a euphemism to call this waste "demand". It's purpose is not to facilitate an expanded production but to void the subversive potential of excess production that has *already* expanded.
in the (un)productive labor literature, there are at least two differrent visions here. One (Thomas More, Paul Baran) is that unproductive labor -- here guard labor needed to preserve domination -- would not be needed in a rational society. Another (Marx) is that this unproductive labor represents an overhead cost that's needed to preserve the system but does not contribute directly to the production of surplus-value.
There is something Veblen-ish about this perspective and, in fact, the Veblenian, Stuart Chase wrote a book called "The Tragedy of Waste" (there should be a sequel, "The Farce of Waste").
didn't Veblen also deal with the unproductive costs of competition/monopoly, including capitalist-organized sabotage?
To get an idea of what's happening, you have to set aside the building block view of capital accounting and consider the value of capital as the discounted present value of a projected future flow of revenues. The concept of "goodwill" is useful here. Goodwill is defined by Commons as the difference between the capitalization based on the present value of future revenues and the bricks-and-machines value of the "means of production".
isn't that the usual definition? I'm not an accountant, but isn't "good will" a residual to explain why the the market price of the equity (representing present value) does not correspond to the balance sheet's difference between measureable assets and measureable liabilities?
The role of unproductive labour from such a perspective is not to contribute to present production in anyway but to maintain the goodwill spread between the two kinds of capitalization. As such "goodwill ambassadors" these unproductive workers don't need to be employed by the capitalist firm, either directly or indirectly. They can write editorials for the Wall Street Journal or teach post-structuralist critical theory.
true. -- Jim Devine / "The crippling of individuals I consider the worst evil of capitalism. Our whole educational system suffers from this evil. An exaggerated competitive attitude is inculcated into the student, who is trained to worship acquisitive success as a preparation for his future career." -- Albert Einstein.
