David Harvie on Productive vs Unproductive Labor
- Article: David Harvie. All Labour Produces Value For Capital And We All Struggle Against Value.
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)