[...] I have no interest in writing a suburban California survival memoir, either, and I write about myself like a bad bowler anyway, always headed straight for the gutters of historical context rather than for the pins of personal revelation.
In the form given to it by Jerome in the sentence cited above, the phrase upon which the issue turns is “average skill.” Since, with the development of technology and the application to it of the fundamental sciences, the labor processes of society have come to embody a greater amount of scientific…
For economists today, therefore, the question of “productive” or “unproductive” labor has lost the great interest which it had for the early bourgeois economists, just as it has lost interest for capitalist management itself. Instead, the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applie…
Essentially, Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. This excludes all labor which is not exchanged against capital. Self-employed proprietors—farmers, artisans, handicraftsman, tradesmen, professionals, all other…
