Rethinking Productive Labour

Abstract

This paper reexamines the concept of productive labour in the principles of political economy in the light of the diversified labour of the present day. Productive labour has so far been implicitly identified with value formation labour in the controversies on productive labour. This conventional view is equally adopted by the two leading scholars UNO Kozo and SUGAWARA Youshin. The former assumes productive labour in the complex of production process by situating the substance of value in the theory of production process. The latter points out that social alliances in production process inevitably require the labour of transportation and storage and the regulatory labour among various production processes, both of which are not directly involved in the formation of use-value. On the other hand, YAMAGUCHI Shigekatsu succeeds in the division of productive labour and value formation labour by distinguishing between the linkage "standard organization" and the technologically-determined labour linkage which regulates the gravity center in price fluctuation. His discussion reveals that, among the types of "incorporeal Km (life material)" productive labour, the one combined with consumption can be regarded as labour without quantitative stability. Consequently, it becomes possible to theoretically integrate into the principles of economics the meritocracy labour with continuous service raise based on assessment and the domestic labour as well as the unskilled labour that leads to the current non-regular employment.