I have been following what I take to be an inconsistency in Marx’s application of the notion of productive and unproductive labor – for which I’ve received rather puzzling feedback by two commentors, Duncan and Chuckie K., in my next to last post. I find it puzzling because the response doesn’t address the argument at all – that is, doesn’t deny the inconsistency – but simply insists, in spite of numerous textual instances in Marx that I’ve included (from Capital 2 and from the Theories of Surplus Value) that Marx only and always identifies productive labor as follows: (A) “Where all labor is partially recompensed by itself as is the agricultural labor of sharecroppers [Fronbauern] for example, and is partly exchanged against revenue as the manufacturing work of cities in Asia, no Capital exists and no wage labor in the sense of the bourgeois economy. These determinations, thus, do not derive from the material routine [Leistung] of work nor from the nature of their products nor the rou
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