David Harvie on Productive vs Unproductive Labor
* Article: David Harvie. All Labour Produces Value For Capital And We All Struggle Against Value. The Commoner, No. 10.
Summary
From the reading notes of Michel Bauwens, 2006:
Orthodox Marxists see this as a key distinction, while autonomists disregard such a strict dichotomy. Harvie hopes to retain the concepts, but to use it in an 'open mode', i.e. concluding that the category is contingent on class struggle.
The essay has three parts
- 1) reviewing Marx's position
- 2) asking whether the concept is still operative in the strict sense (answer: No)
- 3) how then, should it be adapted ?
The distinction is as follows: productive labour directly produces surplus value, what does not do so, is unproductive. This definition is social,
- 1) because it is not tied to the type of work or product
- 2) because it recognizes cooperative division of labour (=indirect work such as organizing / designing can be considered productive)
Unproductive labour is the one involved in
- 1) the circulation of commodities
- 2) the supervision of workers
Harvie then examines four interpretations within Marxist theory:
I. The analytical school: Fred Moseley, Simon Mohun, Anwar Shaikh
Thesis: nonproductive labour consumes wealth
The PUPL distinction is important for 3 general reasons:
- 1) wages of unproductive workers have to be paid by the productive ones. This is a limit on capital accumulation
- 2) it is important for social bookkeeping, i.e. for calculating the rate of profit, surplus value, etc..
- 3) it is necessary to measure the impact of state intervention on income redistribution
There are four basic activities of social reproduction:
- 1) production - 2) distribution - 3) social maintenance - 4) personal consumption
Only 1 of them is productive labour, i.e. that "which transforms nature", while the rest are historically determined operations on human beings.
Labour which produces use-value outside of the commodity format "is not productive of and for capital".
Only labour-power exchanged as capital is productive.
According to such researchers, these ratios are measurable
- the ratio of unproductive labour to productive labour has substantially increased in the post-war economy, at least half the wages go to unproductive labour
Yet there is a paradoxical problem for Marxist economics : why are goods with a higher ratio of unproductive labour, such as Nike shoes, so much more expensive?
For author David Harvie, when he looks at the enormous increase in the 'imposition of work', especially through the unproductive work, this does not mark the PUPL distinction as false, but as irrelevant.
Harvie next turns to a discussion of abstract labour: "heterogenous concrete labors are rendered abstract by the market". But his process of 'commensuration' (= measuring), in increasingly more difficult as we move to complex cooperative labour.
Excerpt
From the Introduction, David Harvie:
"IFor most Marxists, and Marxist economists in particular, the distinction between productive and unproductive labour is of key importance, essential to a proper understanding of variables such as the rates of surplus value and profit, and hence of capitalism’s development and tendency towards crisis. Indeed, those who deny this distinction are frequently portrayed as of dubious adherence to Marxism’s central tenets and, in particular, to the labour theory of value.
[I]f the distinction between productive and unproductive labor is rejected, then other fundamental categories of Marx’s theory lose their theoretical coherence. It is not possible both to maintain the labor theory of value and to dispense with its fundamental building blocks. (Mohun 1996: 31) Yet, a number of Marxists working outside of the economics discipline, and many of those outside of Marxist orthodoxy –– in particular those within the tradition of autonomia (‘autonomist’ Marxism) –– have allowed the distinction to fall by the wayside. For them such a distinction is (implicitly) illusory: One can only conclude that the definition of productive labor which we begin to find in these pages of the Grundrisse and which we will find in other works is a heavily reductive definition in the literal form it assumes. We reject it in the literal form which it takes because it is invalidated by an objectivist, atomized, and fetishist consideration of theory of value: it is the consideration which is exactly the one one would want to attribute to Marx in order to make him an old materialist of the 18th century. (Negri 1991: 64; emphasis in original).
But despite continuing development of thought within both these traditions, there has been little mutual engagement. In this paper I propose a rereading of Marx’s distinction between productive and unproductive labour. I suggest that Negri et al. are too hasty in rejecting the distinction."
(https://cupdf.com/document/unproductive-and-productive-labor-harvie.html?page=1)