Productive labor & Production vs. Reproduction

Here's Loren Goldner on what I was talking about in terms of productive vs. re-productive labor (I should have used the latter term, I apologize). I think I meant to say that I think a more fundamental question for capitalism is reproductive vs. unreproductive labor as opposed to productive in terms of producing exchange value for the individual enterprise (not sure if this is what Brendan meant, but I guess I'm saying that in terms of the mortal crisis of capitalism, the questions of the total social capital, and the reproductive capacities of total social labor power are important):

PRODUCTION OR REPRODUCTION?
Against A Reductionist Reading of Capital In the Left Milieu, And Elsewhere
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/prodorreprod.html

“Accumulation requires the transformation of a portion of the surplus product into capital. But we cannot, except by a miracle, transform into capital anything but such articles as can be employed in the labour process (i.e. means of production), and such further articles as are suitable for the sustenance of the worker (i.e. means of subsistence)… In a word, surplus-value can be transformed into capital only because the surplus product, whose value it is, already comprises the MATERIAL COMPONENTS of a new quantity of capital.” (Capital, vol. I, pp. 726-727) (our emphasis)

"'Surplus value,' once again, is not just an abstract category that it was and is for so many Marxists past and present; in a way similar to Marx and Rosa Luxemburg, it is necessary to understand “surplus value” concretely, as a mass of producer and consumer goods, the nature of whose material content and concrete consumption (i.e. by whom) is of utmost importance for understanding an economy. Instead of getting drawn into endless and tedious (and formal) arguments about the “falling rate of profit,” we also insist on the “circuit” (Kreislauf in Marx’s usage in Capital) of a society’s REinvestment of the social surplus into expansion (or its unproductive consumption of the surplus in the case of contraction) to further means of production and labor power, as the ultimate criterion for determining a system’s dynamic. This idea, once grasped, shows the “affluent society” of the 1950’s and 1960’s, not to mention the post-1973 U.S. economy, “the richest country in the world,” to be a decaying society living on borrowed time (and increasingly on borrowed funds). The dominant economic ideology solves the problem of counting apples, oranges and pears by classifying all of them as “apples” in the banal distorted concept of “GDP” where the production of guided missiles, skyscrapers for corporate bureaucrats and police locks to protect inhabitants of investment-starved cities is counted indifferently alongside the necessary consumption of the working class, including its education, health care and leisure. [this is what I was talking about I suppose]

For Hegel and for Marx, an object (in Marx’s case, a commodity) has no “discrete” existence “in itself,” but is rather a RELATIONSHIP (in Marx’s case, a self-relationship of production and reproduction), mediated by an object. S/(C+V), then, is not merely the “rate of profit” of capitalism, but also the “rate of surplus energy” for any society, past, present or future. Further, it is emphatically NOT a reductionist “quantitative” ratio, but rather (to use Hegel’s term, easily evident in Marx) a “relationship that relates itself to itself,” a SELF-REFLEXIVE relationship (Marx defines capital as “value valorizing itself”). Every society (largely unconsciously, particularly in the case of capitalism) “deliberates” on its use of S, and it is in this “deliberation,” however mediated by social relations and ideology, that the “sensuous transformative praxis” of the Theses on Feuerbach—the unique ability of human beings to express their “species-being” in the qualitative transformation of the biosphere and hence of themselves—is practically linked to social reproduction. One can understand this on four successively deeper levels: 1. the total social product (the capitalist myth of “GDP”) as the “sum” of all individual capitals, or a “total price”; (market price) 2. the total social product as the total value of all individual capitals, understood (in an actually Marxist view) as the total social labor time necessary to reproduce the total product today; (total value) 3. the total social product as the total literal (“use value”) goods and services, divided into means of production and means of consumption, available for either expanded or contracted social reproduction; But all of these successive approximations are reified expressions of 4. S/(C+V) as LABOR POWER IN RELATIONSHIP TO ITSELF, the ultimate reality of world history. Even the most sophisticated representation of S/(C+V) in terms of social labor time of reproduction is somewhat reductionist, because expanded reproduction is constantly revolutionizing the “standard” of value as measured in labor time, creating an “apples to oranges” problem for any attempt to quantitatively express social reproduction over time. Capital, as self-valorizing value, is the commodified inversion of self-developing labor power."
(Goldner, "Social Reproduction for Beginners: Bringing the Real World Back In" http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/socreprod.html )

This is I guess what I was talking about.

Also check Goldner's homepage (http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner) for any articles mentioning fictitious capital and reproduction for other explanations of this obsession of his. The best explanation is probably in Chapter I (not the introduction, but Chapter 1) of his book Remaking of the American Working Class http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/remaking.html