Aufheben, unproductive labor, Fortunati

I can accept this insofar as advertisments are themselves sold as commodities. Nevertheless, their value is negligible given the fact that the labor that goes into originally producing the ad is rapidly devalued to the cost of the materials on which the ads are printed. (For example, the cost of paper and printing, and close to zero in the case of electronic ads.)

Of course, ads do help individual firms acquire extra profit by drawing demand away from competition. But there is a difference between the acquisition of profit and the production of surplus-value.

See my response to Red.

Mike

Dave C's extract is fine. I think it's fair to say that the majority of completely unproductive jobs emerged fairly organically from the 'necessary yet unproductive' sphere of circulation - but that these have been expanded beyond what anyone could have imagined 130 (or even 90) years ago.

and insofar as jobs are 'necessary yet unproductive,' they tend to take on the qualities of productive labour - i.e. they will be rationalised, work will be intensively and extensively expanded, subject to managerial discipline, alienated etc - from the individual firm's point of view the labour is necessary (even as overhead) and they seek to get the most out of 'their' resource, thus through the competition of the market the law of value exerts itself even over workers who don't produce value. contra the autonomists, taking on the characteristics of productive labour doesn't mean all labour becomes productive.

Surplus value isn't profit. About to go out but it looks like you're treating it like that. You're also taking things back to the level of the individual firm, rather than looking at the total social product. The level of the individual firm is good for looking at fixed and variable capital, relative and absolute surplus value etc. (and I'd agree(?) with Mikus that these concepts are useful for analysing all kinds of labour whether we think value is produced by it or not) - it's not useful for looking at wage levels vs. prices -

Wages are paid at the cost of reproduction (which is itself socially determined) - in other words they're paid at +- their full value. I don't see how the wages of a truck driver can equal the full cost of transport - the truck, petrol/gas, warehousing, forklifts, road maintenance, (climate change ) - these are all part of the cost of production (accounted for or otherwise). Wages are also determined by the strength of the truck drivers, not to mention the variations in gas prices - you can't 'calculate' surplus value out of monetary amounts.

I think I already answered this in my earlier posts. Value is not determined by the actual labor-time embodied in any specific commodity, but by the labor-time socially necessary (i.e. average labor-time) to produce a commodity. This means that the moment the "non-physical" commodities are produced, their value falls to zero. In other words, once research and development is completed the labor-time necessary to produce the commodity falls to the physical costs of reproduction. The research and development labor (I suppose this would correspond to the non-physical or immaterial labor) is not redone over and over again. This goes for advertising as well as for Ipods.

This seems to me to be the more commonsense approach. It seems much more strange to suppose that advertising can in the aggregate increase the mass of profit than to suppose that it can't, and that it only affects profit's distribution between enterprises.

I'll look over the trucking example later.

Mike

Research and development are socially necessary for the production of commodities in present day production conditions. Especially today, where a new model of chip, car, blender or advertisement is designed each cycle, it is only socially necessary to produce a given commodity model a given number of times. How many units of a given model of commodity are produced depends on the nature of the commodity but no society produces an infinite number. Therefore, for any given material or immaterial commodity, the socially necessary labor of research and development labor is a part of its value - the labor time of research and development is simply divided over the number of commodities produced in the useful lifecycle of the commodity model (for some known commodity types, their socially necessary research labor time may be zero but this is more the exception than the rule today).
It is known that in practice, chip companies and video production companies successfully include their massive costs of research and development into the prices of the items they sell.

All of that amounts to nothing more than an analysis of the phrase "socially necessary" and then giving your own judgment on what is or isn't "socially necessary." Okay, you can play with words.

If this is the case, why does the price of an Ipod fall so fast? Why has the Iphone devalued so quickly (over $100 per phone in a few months)? According to you, Apple should be able to make the average (in Apple's case, I'm sure above-average) profit on the initial investment rather than on the reproduction cost of the commodities. It should be clear that the price of their products falls with the reproduction cost.

The same goes for the pharmaceutical industry. On your definition of "socially necessary labor-time", the pharmaceutical companies should not give a shit about patent laws because the price of drugs should be high enough to allow research and development costs to be covered. But the pharmaceuticals themselves apparently do not agree with you, which is why they spend millions of dollars ever year campaigning to keep these supposedly unnecessary laws in place.

Or the entertainment industry. Why do you think pirating is such a big deal? If it were legal, the price of DVDs would drop extremely low, as their reproduction cost is barely anything. (In other countries where the copyrights aren't enforced, the prices are already extremely low. You can buy high quality new movies, still in theatres, for less than a dollar in many parts of South America.)

Given your attempt to change the definition of "socially necessary labor-time", none of this should be the case.

As I said above, this is true only where there are patent laws.

You assume that the price of a production reflects a commodity's value exactly when it is well known that random fluctuations of many sorts happen between the two. But even if this is the case, then the fact that Apple is able to charge for research and development quite readily should show that this is part of the value of the commodity.

Anyway, I wouldn't object to an argument that research labor tends to be concentrated more in the first commodities that are sold rather and less in the later ones. But this just reinforces the point that these costs are part of both the price and the value of a commodity since a model of a commodity is only reproduced a finite number of times and since research and development is a normal part of producing a line of commodities.

If research and development was socially unnecessary, why can't companies simply abandon it and still make a profit? (I suppose if they violate everyone else's patents, that might be possible but somehow isn't permitted by society).

Drug companies need patent laws just as jewelers need locks and keys on their stores. The fact that someone can easily duplicate intellectual property in an illegal fashion proves nothing about its value (though it certainly shows contradictions in capitalist relations). Capitalism has always required the police to make certain that trade happens according to its laws. Patent laws aren't laws that I've made up. Unlike your claims, they are the laws of ... society (get the connection to society, social?).

Socally necessary labor is the necessary average labor which is required within the capitalist production process. It doesn't include downloading files, robbery, squatting or unusual violations of labor codes.

Some riddles: Is the value of a gold watch the amount of labor required to take possession of it through an armed robbery? If a mine owner can extract twice as much ore per hour by violating labor codes which are effectively enforced, does this mean that ore is being sold for twice its "real value"? Does widespread pirating of music prove that a CD has no value?

Meaning in present day capitalist society? Meaning the modern world? Patent protections are easier to enforce than copyrights since there aren't as many potential violators.
Socially necessary means necessary in the context of the laws and customs of a society. Housing would be a lot cheaper if there were no property laws or zoning ordinances - I could argue that because of this, the labor of construction workers is unproductive but I'd be making an argue as spurious as .... well, you.

After rereading what you wrote, I'm not sure I disagree (if I understand you correctly). You seem to be saying that various legal restrictions serve to maintain relatively large amounts of socially necessary labor-time need to produce commodities (i.e. they serve to reduce productivity). I agree. But it would still be the case that the average productivity (which is the same thing as "socially necessary labor-time") is significantly lower than what the commodities are sold for in the US. (Obviously there are value/price deviations anyway, but I don't think this changes the main point in this case.) I say this because in much of the capitalist world, perhaps the bulk of it (South America and Asia in particular) those copyright restrictions are not enforced in any significant way.

There are a couple unresolved issues, though.

We both seem to agree that research and development labor is devalued relatively rapidly. Exactly at what point does this occur? You proposed something like incorporating the research and development labor into the first run of a commodity and then saying that after that the commodity is devalued. (Again, if I understand you correctly.) This seems somewhat plausible when dealing with certain commodities (like Ipods, which don't survive very long before a new generation appears) but when dealing with things like microchips which are produced for somewhat longer periods of time, speaking of an initial production period becomes not only hard to calculate, but hard to imagine in principle.

Given my understanding of the magnitude of constant capital being the same for both values and prices, it seems possible to take the current cost of the means of production as the datum that tells you when devaluation has occurred. (I.e. When the means of production used by a firm have dropped in price, the value of the final commodity has correspondingly dropped.) Given deviations of price from value and therefore profit from surplus-value, this would not give you an exact measure of devaluation (in terms of value), but it would allow you to know when devaluation has occurred. (If you think the magnitude of constant capital with regard to values and prices are not the same, then of course looking at price changes in means of production would tell you nothing.)

Secondly, how could this be calculated? As I understand it, accountants can calculate moral depreciation in a number of different ways, but it is relevant not getting this confused with value determination, since it is always possible that an accountant can for example, attribute some profit (what we would theoretically call profit, in any case) to cost-price, etc. The real issue is the determination of the total price, since that is what is broken up into its constituents (cost-price, profit, etc.). This is no easy task.

Michael Perelman recently wrote a book called Railroad Economics which may be of interest, since it seems to deal with moral depreciation in the railroad industries earlier in the century. I'm not a big Perelman fan but his book may shed some light on the issue.

Mike

At the risk of labouring a point I think a number of these issues on 'productive' and 'unproductive' labour etc are also covered in the IP texts I refer to on the other thread relating to Rosa Luxemburg etc at;

http://internationalist-perspective.org/IP/ip-archive/ip_30-31_cap-crisis_intro.html

which I was hoping for some feedback on from the more experienced posters on this thread.

Does 'reproductive labour (the production of labour power) produce value'?
In my view, the only serious answer to this question is yes.
That which produces something which has value, must be productive of value. It's very simple.

Most of the lakes of ink that have flowed on this topic have helped constitute a perfect example of a swamp of academic codswallop, focusing as they do on abstruse discussions of categories such as value, production, etc.

By 'abstruse', I mean irrelevant to:

• working class experience,
• working class 'composition' in the real sense, (i.e. who's who, who does what, who experiences what, and what do people's conditions, circumstances, and actions share), and
• the real power relations between classes.

Here's an analysis that focuses on the latter...

Outside of the employed workforce are many millions of proletarians deemed by capital to be worth allowing to survive because, e.g.

• they help reproduce someone else's labour-power,
• they bring up those whose labour-power will be exploitable in the future, or
• they themselves are expected to have some exploitable labour-power in the future (either the near future or, in the case of young proletarian children, the more distant future)

Think of it as like cattle-breeding.

In some (not all) parts of the world, you also have in the proletariat some groups who don't fall into any of the above categories, being within the permanently unemployable unemployed, but who are not, for the moment, being killed off (or allowed to die off through disease). This is so even if

• this looks as though it will change, and
• other parts are being killed off, even in the said parts of the world, e.g. say, a black homeless person in America has little chance of living to be older than 40. Ditto a Gypsy in the UK who suffers from major physical and mental handicaps. The medics won't exactly rush to get the defibrillator out.

In some places, capital would actually like to kill groups off but, to a non-negligible extent, there is actually a level of proletarian power (obviously diminishing) that prevents them. If for example the authorities tried to round up for execution, in one fell swoop, all of the unemployable disabled living on council estates in London, there would be some irritating resistance. At the present time, that is.

Since:

• capital gets its life-blood from wage-labour, and only from wage-labour;
• the main resistance would be proletarian; and
• most proletarians do engage in productive labour (or are held to be worth keeping alive because one day they might, or because they're helping reproduce that capacity in someone else),

– one could, if one really wanted to, describe these individuals' social activities as assisting in the psychological reproduction of exploitable labour-power. This is because productive labourers (or those in the other groups involved in, or potentially involved in, or aiding, the reproduction of labour-power) would turn into 'less good' workers if their neighbours got carted off to the gas chambers.

Let's not kid ourselves that it's out of the kindness of their hearts that the rulers allow some unemployable unemployed people, whether sick, elderly, or whatever, to survive... They never choose a less profitable option out of the kindness of their hearts. There is no kindness in their hearts! They are completely amoral.

But while this description of psychological reproduction is true, that's only one aspect of it, basically being how it seems from the viewpoint of capital. If you like, it's the economic side of it.

The other aspect is that what we are talking about here is the class power of the proletariat, which is what defines the non-lumpenised unemployable unemployed as...part of the said proletariat. And this is how the topic relates not just to relations between groups in society, but to the class power of the proletariat as a large class.

The above covers why the topic should be interesting to critics of capitalism. Namely, as I said: working class experience, working class 'composition', and the real class power relation. All the rest is angels on pinheads as far as I'm concerned!

bbbbb

say i particularly enjoy sitting on the beach and watching the sunset. does the earth's rotation produce value for capital? you're conflating moral worth with capitalist production.

bbbbbb, the discussion is whether certain productive activities produces value for capital, i.e. surplus value that can be accumulated. It's a technical marxist discussion, so your "that which produces something which has value, must be productive of value" in this context does not hold.

This is slightly off-topic, but can someone explain why arms production for war, the entire military industrial complex, is not productive labor? I've seen this idea come up a few times in the thread. Doesn't this industry take money, produce commodities, and these are then sold back to the government or mercenary companies? And isn't this socially necessary/useful production, since capitalist society has a real need for permanent war and a real need to employ so many otherwise unemployed angry workers?

And on topic, isn't advertising producing a useful ideological commodity, much like school teachers? Useful in the sense that if capitalism can't convince people to be such consumers and so consumerist (just as in teaching if it can't convince people to be such patriots) wouldn't there be more dangerous social unrest? And hence this pacification by the advertising industry (where, in America, most people watch the Super Bowl to watch the ads, not the football) and hyping up unimpressive, repackaged products is in itself useful for capitalism?

Can anyone sort this out-is this too autonomist?

The issue is that they're sold to capital, not workers, and also don't replace means of production (in fact they usually destroy it of course) - they're essential for Capital to maintain control yes, but don't aid it's overall expansion since war just redistributes resources between various nations.

The difference between advertising and teaching is that teaching reproduces workers as workers - there does need to be basic levels of literacy, numeracy and some other skills to be able to turn up to work on time. You could maybe say that the conditioning aspects of education bear some relation to advertising, but I think it operates at an entirely different level.

Joseph K wrote:

When I wrote of something that "has value", I meant in Marx's sense. I didn't mean worth or usefulness, whether moral or other. Also by "production", I meant human making, in this case alienated (because we are talking about value). I didn't mean causation. The earth's rotation doesn't produce anything, so the answer to the question is no.

Khawaga, you seem to be misinterpreting what I wrote in the same way that Joseph K did, for some reason, although you responded much more snottily. You make it sound as though you haven't previously encountered non-academic Marxism, for which concepts are rooted in, and constantly rediscovered in consideration of, real antagonistic class relations. (That's the idea anyway; one can't live up to it with absolute perfection!). I use "value" to mean the form which has as its content abstract labour, just as Marx and Rubin did.

There is no need to have a great discussion on whether reproductive labour produces value "for capital", because the issue is very simple. (Moreover, what the hell else does any activity produce value for, other than for capital?? Capital is self-expanding value!)

Frankly you can take your "technical" Marxism and shove it where the sun doesn't shine, if it produces dismissiveness, condescension, and incomprehension towards what I wrote.

bbbbb

(Pre-script for khawaga - what follows will not be 'technical', so no need to read it if you think that makes it irrelevant).

Catch, in my view the answer is yes, production of advertising is certainly productive of value. Companies don't just chuck their money away. Advertising brings a return in excess of the money spent on it. This is the case even in sectors where expenditure on marketing, advertising, and public relations is huge, such as pharmaceuticals, where it far exceeds the amounts spent on 'production' in the narrow sense, research, and development all added together. In that particular case, that's why your 'average' proletarian woman in Britain visits a medic once every 6 weeks.

Remember too that as Beaverbrook once observed (and he knew what he was talking about), news is what someone wants kept out of the newspapers; everything else that gets printed in them is advertising.

As for weapons production, mostly the answer is the same (they don't chuck their money away), although given the role of bureaucratic (State) rake-off, there can be circumstances where it's a drain on surplus value, i.e. it's about one faction grabbing money from the others. The consumption of surplus value. The latter is also the case in regions where there is proportionally large State expenditure on administration to a degree where, at a certain level of appearance, its 'own' 'logic' prevails, which is true in many 'less developed' areas of 'more developed' countries (e.g. the Scottish Highlands). Even here, this also can be about the central strategic controllers not wanting things to fall apart, and wanting to keep the areas available for military purposes. Local high-caste types and successful racketeers and hoodlums (local 'elites', if you like) know how to make themselves 'necessary'.

Anyone who thinks capitalist decline, decadence, crisis, or collapse will involve capitalists having unworkably small amounts of profit because for one reason or another, the objective contradictions of the system, or the dynamic thereof, has led them to chuck their money away (on weapons, on State administration, etc.), is living in cloud-cuckoo land. Baran and Sweezy never sussed that one!

bbbbb

isn't this a false argument tho? i understand each capitalist to receive an average rate of profit, the average across the whole of capital. so that the only way a capitalist can make more quicker, is not through employing productive labour, but through investing where there is demand.

i get this from a quick reading of rubin and i'm trying to put the notes together now, so am i wrong??

i think the mistake you're making might be that value is not just composed of surplus value, but that other stuff too.

well i still think you're wrong, because you're arguing that value production means 'useful to capital somehow' which isn't how marx uses it. if the unemployed produce value because they have some function for capital (as reserve army or whatever) then consumption must be production too, because capitalism needs that too. when i buy a burger am i producing value? what about when no money is involved at all, say when i teach my kid some maths, that might one day help them in the labour market and help valorise capital, is that productive of value (in the marxist sense) too?

i don't see what is gained by collapsing so much human activity into a single category of production which seems to be rendered useless by such a collapse, and aufheben have traced some of the negative consequences of such autonomism, one of which is a loss of class perspective by collapsing production and circulation (and reproduction) into one category and not grasping their inter-relation, an inter-relation which is precisely working class experience.

bbbbb,

when I use the word "technical" it's because it's relatively irrelevant to other issues. you accuse me of misinterpreting what you write, well you my good sir is guilty of the same.

lem:

I think you are confusing the production of surplus value ("employing productive labour") with its realisation ("making more", i.e. making profit, which depends on sale and therefore "demand").

I do accept that there are many circumstances where what appears to be "production" is little more than an excuse for one capitalist to rob the stock of surplus value. E.g. local authority workers doing the office-work equivalent (or the actual practice!) of digging in holes and filling them in again, to justify some money-grabbers getting a large contract or grant. A huge amount of State-sector office work (and not just office work) in the UK is like that. Computers haven't helped cut labour costs in many fields, in which there is large-scale over-employment. But who said capitalism was sane? It isn't. But what it is, is a whole, and the very category of surplus value has zilch to do with human need. (The same statement about value, however, insofar as the commodity brings together use-value and exchange-value, would not be accurate).

I am not wholly sure what you are criticising here. If you are criticising my definition of value, I would disagree because surplus value only has abstract labour as its content because it is surplus value. If it wasn't, it would be some other form of the surplus product and would not have abstract labour as its substance. What you say is right, but it does not conflict with the definition of value (which is the same as Rubin's). (You may also find Geoff Kay useful on this stuff).

Alternatively, you may be criticising my statement that

...the context being the reproduction of the worker.

If so...take the example of a housewife who does all the housework for her husband who is an employed worker, and is not herself employed outside of the home. Although he probably exploits her, I am not saying he is a capitalist and she is his wage-slave. Both of them are engaged in productive activities that are within the capitalist economy of generalised exchange furthering the accumulation of capital; and both of them are also reproduced within this economy. It may not seem so, but her labour is actually as abstract as his.

The male worker's labour-power has value, therefore what produces or reproduces it is producing or reproducing value. It would be a mistake to view the housewife's labour as taking place outside of the economy; it doesn't.

I only said, though, that she produces value, not surplus value. However, now that you have raised the distinction (a very important one!), it is also true that she produces surplus value, as Dalla Costa argued.

A more subtle mistake than ignoring the fact that the housewife's labour takes place within the economy is ignoring the fact that her own reproduction also takes place within the economy. Once said, of course, it's obvious - she eats the same meals etc. as he does, buying them with a chunk of 'his' wage. So does she labour more than is 'necessary'? Well to the extent that he does, he needs to be reproduced to do so. E.g. if he works 8 hours a day, and 2 are surplus labour-time, he will get his clothes dirtier than if he only worked 6. So if she washes them, then the answer must be yes.

This is perhaps a revoltingly simplified example, but the bottom line is that the housewife in this example is exploited by her husband's boss, by capital.

bbbbb

i don't think you can collapse production and reproduction with a simple 'or' - they're distinct spheres even if there are times when they blur and overlap.

does she say that? i'm re-reading 'the power of women' at the moment and haven't got to her saying that, can't remember. if she does she's wrong though, husbands' wages, in aggregate are equal to the cost of their reproduction as labour power - i.e. that of the nuclear family which has the main reproductive unit of capitalist society. there is no surplus produced as the wage covers the cost of reproduction, but there is a partiarchy of the wage insofar as the wage for reproduction accrues only to the husband while the work is not done mainly by him. i thought dalla costa made the point that this situation more resembled pre-capitalist production than the production of surplus value?

i mean we went over this several pages ago, but say my wife leaves me, when i do my own cooking and clothes washing am i producing surplus value, am i being exploited by capital? no, i'm reproducing myself as labour-power, but it is my actual labour in the sphere of production which (may) produce surplus value, not it's mere potentiality (which is sold at its cost, exploitation is not unequal exchange in the market). like i say aufheben have shown the consequences of these negrian flights of fancy , i'm re-reading dalla costa as i seem to remember her being more nuanced.

Joseph K:

I'm not!

I am beginning to wonder what planet you are on. You asked whether the earth's rotation produced value. I said no. Now you ask whether burger purchase produces value. The answer is again no.

Someone in the reserve army of labour does not produce value, except of course when they are also in another category in which people do.

You seem to be building a whole straw man on the false idea that value production is defined by what is useful to capital, which no-one has said.

As for consumption being production (and for that matter, distribution), though, it often is, as Marx says in the Grundrisse.

No; nor does breastfeeding. That would be stretching the concept of labour-power beyond breaking-point, to some kind of 'potential potential'. A better case to consider would be a housewife who washes her husband's work clothes.

I'm not particularly interested in what Aufheben say. I've viewed them as charlatans ever since I found out that they described the Six-Day War as a response to the growing power of the proletariat. I accept there is some truth in what you say. Yes, reproduction is different from production in the strict sense. But an argument over whether or not it should be called a stage in production would be just an argument over words, a waste of time. Understanding what drudgery etc. we experience as 'necessary' just because we are forced to survive economically, is highly relevant to the serious critique of existing conditions.

What it's also important to understand is that the bosses, if they had everything their way, would only suffer proletarians to eat and survive to the extent that, and as long as, we are 'useful for capital'. Think of it as like cattle-breeding.

Any 'Marxist' theorising which doesn't have an understanding of that as part of its basis, whether it's 'Autonomist' or something better (and I'm no Autonomist!), is of little interest to me.

khawaga - thank you for the clarification, but the force of my criticism stands, because in my contribution I sought precisely to relate this to "other issues", which I even listed with bullet-points. Saying a discussion of value production is irrelevant to these issues...gets us where, exactly? I recall in another thread you said that hating capitalists gets in the way of criticising capital... We obviously approach stuff from very different places.

Joseph K wrote:

Yes, she does. I think it's in that particular essay too, but I haven't got access to a copy right now. If it's not there, it's somewhere else.

I wish your sentences could be shorter!

Assuming you accept that said reproduction is done by labour...do you think there is wage-labour but no value production?

As for whether or not there is a surplus (even if you don't accept it takes a value form)...most workers have to have the right clothes prepared for going to work, etc. etc. This labour is part of the production of what the husband produces at work, and is over and above the mere reproduction of his survival. Compare with circumstances where his work involves assembling components of something or other, and his wife separates them into categories and lays them out for him in a box before he takes them to work. Would that be so essentially different from getting his clothes ready?

But the wage does not only accrue to the husband. She did indeed say that; I recall the phrase 'slave of a wage-slave' or something similar; she was wrong.

'Patriarchy' is a confused concept; this is capitalism, not rule by men over women.

If your job involves strenuous physical work you will need to eat more food accordingly. Similarly most jobs require some sort of care over clothing that would not otherwise be needed. I am not saying you can look at every little action, and that when a worker combs his hair he's producing value. Ditto you cannot find the presence of capitalism by just looking at what goes on in one workplace. Let's not make a mistake when looking at the home that we wouldn't make when looking at work for an employer.

The 'sphere of production' does include much stuff that goes on in the home, and whereas I'd agree that Autonomist ideologues have exaggerated this, one can also make the opposite mistake of thinking of the formal end of the working day as drawing an absolute boundary in the worker's experience, which it doesn't, not in the sense we're talking about. Anyway the hell with Autonomism, I'm not trying to be an Autonomism salesman.

bbbbb

Joseph K - I just found Dalla Costa's essay here, and here with an intro and the Selma James involvement. The text at the former link is better edited. She does use the phrase "slave of a wage-slave", and is wrong about that in my view. She also talks about the housewife's production of surplus value in the home. (Doubtless someone could analyse the footnote, which refers to some readers' misunderstandings of this point, and say it changes the line slightly, although I wouldn't say that).

I think the issue of whether housework produces value is perhaps more important than the issue of whether it produces surplus value...

bbbbb

sorry i read this...

...as you saying they participated in reproductive labour, which you say produces surplus value. so you're saying that all those proletarians deemed worth keeping alive are so because they do or may one day produce value, or future workers not that worth to capital is value production. ok.

and in capital too he writes that all production is also consumption (of raw materials etc), it doesn't follow that all consumption is production and i doubt marx ever said it did, although from what i've read of the grundrisse it has some odd sections ripe for out-of-context quoting (cf. the 'fragment on machines').

forgive me for being on-topic

well it's not, which is why i referred to aufheben. by collapsing the spheres of production/circulation/reproduction into a production immanent to social life (particularly in negri/hardt), the crucial interaction of the freedom of the sphere of circulation and the despotism of the sphere of production is lost, and worse, an ideal bourgeois freedom can be held up as an alternative rather than being grasped as one side of the capital relation. in this process, particularly in negri despite his terminology a class perspective is lost. that's a crude summary anyway, but aufheben's explored this at length over several years and is worth reading on this imho.

i agree, but i don't see what this has to do with productive labour? i mean iirc dalla costa makes the point that precisely because reproductive labour is not directly related to capital, it is left in pre-capitalist drudgery while capital constantly revolutionises the technology available to productive workers (i.e. much housework could be eliminated by automation etc, but capital only has a reason to do this as a market for consumer white goods, not in the direct way it invests in new machinery in factories etc).

well some of them would probably get all squeamish and guilty about it, but that would only mean they're poor human agents of capital. like i say, i'm not sure how this relates to productive/unproductive labour though? this is where i would say it's not personal hatred of all bosses that's of any use, but hatred of the capital relation they are the (in)human face of. i mean in my last job i hated the boss, he was a complete cunt. in this job he's a nice enough bloke, too bland to hate, more of a nondescript toyotist functionary, but my hatred of the sheer pointlessness and alienation of me having to spend 8+ hours a day doing fuck all in an office to survive is still there alright. of course, hatred of the boss can be a starting point for resistance, but in more toyotist workplaces that personal animosity is less likely to be present, even while alienation and anti-capitalist anger is keenly felt.

how is ironing your clothes part of the production i do at work? it's only indirectly related, in that it is a requirement of being at work that i must be smartly presented. i mean it's certainly an example of how the despotism of production reaches into our 'free' time, but it still only represents the reproduction labour power as opposed to capitalist production, and so i think labelling it productive labour obscures more than it reveals.

marx is at pains to point out the level of reproduction is socially determined and ican be (for us with the benefit of several centuries class struggle, almost always is) sme way above mere biological survivial.

like i say i'm re-reading dalla costa at the moment so i'm reluctant to comment on her further until i've done that, but certainly she emerged from a milieu that sought to explain working class resistance outside the production lines at fiat without abandoning the leninist fetish that said the revolutionary subject was the subject which produced surplus value. i'm not sure how much dalla costa goes along with this, my recollection is she's more sophisticated, but i think it's a mistake, and alienation can better account for proletarian struggles outside of production (including those of housewives (doesn't dalla costa stress separation?).

edit: also i've just re-read that and i also wish my sentences were shorter

i'm not sure if you agree with my statement or not?

that unproductive labour still leads to profit for an individual capitalist, and that this has nothing to do with stealing other capitalists suplus value

Joseph K - you'll presumably agree that we cannot reasonably point to one thing the worker does at work (e.g. producing washers for bog-standard taps) and say he's doing necessary labour (or reproducing the working class) and point to another thing he does 5 minutes later (e.g. producing washers for luxury taps) and say he's doing surplus labour (or reproducing the ruling class, producing for luxury consumption, or in other contexts, producing the part of the surplus that gets accumulated). Am I right? Because he couldn't really give a damn about where this bit of rubber goes and where that bit goes - and why should he?

(For the benefit of anyone who is not familiar with British English but may be with American English, 'tap' is British English for what in American English is a 'faucet'. In case 'washer' isn't used in this sense in American English: it's a rubber ring that seals plumbing to prevent leakage).

But similarly we can't do the same and say that the male worker produces surplus value for part of the time when he's at his job, whereas his wife doesn't produce any surplus when she irons his shirts. Once we accept that it's all part of the economic circuit (in the way that watching a sunset isn't), well you get the point... The economic circuit is about value...and the surplus in capitalist society takes a value form, i.e. it's surplus value...

You keep saying I 'collapse' categories, but you are tending to universalise the distinctions in such a way as to obscure the functioning of the economic circuit, which certainly has parts and stages which are interrelated, but is nonetheless a whole. This is basically the misgiving I have got with your drift...

Dalla Costa doesn't get everything right, and she's lazy in places, but I think her essay is great for stimulating a focus on some of the big issues.

Lastly, you talk of how 'unproductive' labour is not "directly related to capital", but no concrete labour is 'directly' related to capital if you just look at one worker or one workplace (which is exactly what you need to do if considering concrete labour). I.e. if you don't consider the generalised exchange that determines the existence of the category of abstract labour, and therefore of value and capital. Labour is atomised, and it is also socialised. This applies both in the workplace and at home. To talk of value and lose sight of its substance, i.e. abstract labour, is a dead-end.

lem:

Well if it is unproductive (i.e. of surplus value) and it 'leads to' profit, then since all profit comes from surplus value, it must have to do with the capitalist establishing a claim for his appropriation of surplus value that is produced elsewhere, and then approprating said surplus value. So in short, no.

For instance, consider a lot of the 'nonsense' work that goes on in State-sector computer departments, to justify the allocation of IT contracts, with all the associated backhanders to public officials. The paperwork just wouldn't look right unless there were loads of workers beavering around doing alienated work. Managers get more money the more workers they have under them...and so do the companies they allocate contracts to... Some of this also applies in the non-State sector.

(I am convinced the State is involved somewhere along the line, in the circumstances that cause, say, British Telecom to employ such large numbers of workers in call centres, but I digress).

The reason I put 'leads to' in inverted commas is to underline that you are putting your finger on an important topic. The way this work that is (principally) 'justificatory of claims on surplus value' happens, and actually leads to certain capitalist interests getting hold of profits, is a big thing. There's a great deal of it about. Criticising it touches on important historical questions such as

• might capitalism get too mad for its own good?
• will over-employment get to be too big a problem in some areas?
• will they try to massacre large numbers of workers in areas where, at present, they're not doing that?

The category of 'parasitism' also arises here. In Russia in the 1990s, for example, output fell drastically, and no surplus meant no surplus value. But a faction nonetheless made huge profits, which places such as Mayfair in London are now awash with.

That said, I have problems with your concept of 'unproductive labour' because I think it's insufficiently classist, but I hope I've answered the question!

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