VALUE and PRODUCTIVE LABOUR

The traditional distinction between production activities and circulation activities is abandoned : insofar as they consist of indirectly social labour, both types of activities produce commodities and value. A new distinction, however, is made between circulation activities (which require time) and circulation acts
(which are instantaneous) : the former, which belong to production in the broader sense, can create value and surplus value ; the latter, on the contrary, cannot.
The same criterion of indirectly social labour is used to question traditional conceptions of more skilled and more intensive labour. The latter do not create more value than average labour. But they are possible means of increasing labour productivity and are treated as such : if limited to a particular enterprise, they give rise to transfers of surplus revenue ; if generalized throughout the economy, they give rise to a form of production of relative surplus value. A clear distinction is introduced between economic exploitation and physical exploitation, which may move in opposite directions.
The criterion of indirectly social labour is also used to question traditional conceptions concerning the « value of labour-power » and the relations between the latter and the money wage.
The non-conventional viewpoints adopted completely separate the issue of productive labour and that of social classes. At the level of economic theory, the viewpoints adopted combine the advantages of precision and simplicity : on the one hand, they make the theoretical approach more rigorous and coherent ; on the other hand, while justified on purely theoretical grounds, they present the additional advantages of making the theory simpler and allowing a much easier quantification of various key-concepts

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Jacques Gouverneur is D.Phil in Economics of Oxford University and profesor emeritus at the UCL (University of Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium). He is the author of numerous publications in various languages ; the most significant ones are available on www.i6doc.com and www. capitalism-and-crisis.info.