ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: A Reflection on the Dichotomy of Productive and Unproductive Labor.
Author: Callari Antonio
The dichotomy of productive and unproductive labor, as inherited and transmitted by Marx, can and should be seen as a fault-line concept in the architecture of economics. Perhaps not unlike the concept of “capital,” the dichotomy has, seemingly simultaneously, bridged and separated the complex tectonic plates of economics along both methodological and analytical axes. Appropriated by Marx in his ‘dialogic’ confrontation with other ‘theorists of surplus-value’, but falling short of ‘analytical’ closure (in Engels’ and Kautsky’s editorships of Marx’s manuscripts after Marx’s death), the dichotomy has served as a site of contentious encounters of different schools: different schools of thought within Marxist theory; Marxist and feminist economics; and orthodox and heterodox economics. (Roberts, Bruce, Productive/Unproductive: Conceptual Topology. Rethinking Marxism, 26:3. 2014). This paper argues that the dichotomy of productive and unproductive labor is not necessary, even superfluous, to Marx’s theory of surplus-value. The paper traces the persistence of the dichotomy partially to Marx’s own incomplete break with Adam Smith, but argues that the general line of criticism Marx developed of Smith’s handling of the dichotomy (namely that Smith failed to differentiate between “labor embodied” and “labor power”) implies the superfluity of that dichotomy in Marx’s own formulation of the theory of surplus value. The paper concludes with two suggestions that could be seen as resulting from this reading of Marx’s criticism of Smith: the first suggestion is a reconceptualization of the “unproductiveness” of commercial and financial capital (as opposed to an unproductiveness of commercial and financial “labor”); the second suggestion is that an abandonment of the (after all, unnecessary) dichotomy can be a condition for improved communications amongst Marxist theorists and between them and other theorists.
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