So 21.07.2008 09:16

Peter Fleissner

to Dave Zachariah

Hi, Dave,

Thank for coming back to me so quickly. It was my pleasure to meet you at the conference after I have studied your papers before.

I would like to react to your comments.

My definition of productive-unproductive labour is independent from my work on Austrian empirical data. It is only dealing with contradictions in the very basic assumptions of Marx in Volume 1 of Das Kapital with respect to services and does not have direct implications on the level of observed data. It just tries to make the implications for services in Marx' assumptions more explicit. If you agree that services do not contribute to the surplus product, you will have problems to let them produce surplus value.

And the institutional level is very important in Marx' theory. It is crucial if a special firm will make profit. Exploitation is also closely related to it. If you do not split society into classes and into specific firms with certain ownership, how could you establish the dynamics of capitalist competition? or identify any difference between capitalist and socialist society?

In this sense you are right in stating: "Definitions are always arbitrary in the sense that they depend on the questions that one asks....Moreover, we are giving a definition that is invariant to juridical changes." You cannot even speak about profits without the institutional basis of firms or enterprises. You should be able to identify who is gaining profits and who does not, which firm will invest and which one will not. Purely technical relations do not suffice to describe relations of production which are crucial for empirical levels of exploitation. Trade unionists will understand me in their struggle for higher wages in a specific enterprise (e.g. it makes a difference if they work in a vertically integrated firm producing cars in Japan and shipping them to Europe also, or if they work in one of the enterprises, which are the result a split of ownership, one capitalist does only production, and the other only transport). My conclusion: institutions matter. If my argument holds, then the empirical institutional structure of a national economy has to be mirrored also on the level of labour values. I think your position is fine if you are only interested in the economic performance of a national economy, but then you abstract from the actual capitalistic relations of production.

Please understand that all my criticism is not at all meaning that your work would not been very valuable contribution to the LTV. On the contrary, I would like to continue our discussion after I have studied your paper in detail.

…

Best regards

Looking forward to your reaction

Peter