Өнімді және өнімсіз еңбек: Классикалық саяси экономия және қазіргі талқылаулар

Productive and unproductive labour are concepts that were used in classical political economy mainly in the 18th and 19th centuries, which survive today to some extent in modern management discussions, economic sociology and Marxist or Marxian economic analysis. The concepts strongly influenced the construction of national accounts in the Soviet Union and other Soviet type societies (see Material Product System).

The classical political economists, such as Adam Smith and David Ricardo, raised the economic question of which kinds of labour contributed to increasing society's wealth, as against activities which do not increase wealth. In the introduction to The Wealth of Nations, Smith spoke of the "annual labour" and "the necessaries and conveniences" a nation "annually consumes" before explaining that one of the two steps to increase wealth is reducing the amount of "unproductive labour". "Annual" and "annually" refer to a cyclical reproduction process; "unproductive labor" are commodities and services which are not inputs to the next economic cycle and are therefore lost to economic growth. In contrast, theories with no such time horizon tend to understand Smith's unproductive labor as referring to services, and productive labor as meaning vendible goods. Smith’s distinction between productive and unproductive labor corresponds to Sraffa’s (1960) distinction of basic and non basic goods, as basic goods re enter the productive process, whereas non basic goods are destined for consumption, with no value for reproduction. As Edwin Cannan observes, Smith’s view of annual reproduction and as a consequence the distinction of productive and unproductive labor stems from his meeting, and the influence of, the French economists have known as the Physiocrats. Before his visit to France in his Theory of Moral Sentiments Adam Smith sees the gluttony of the landlords as an "invisible hand" which helps the poor to partake in the landlord's wealth. In The Wealth of Nations, it is seen as the consumption of unproductive labor, limiting the growth of wealth. Smith's view that human labour – but not unproductive labour – is the source of wealth reflects the classical position that all commodities can be reduced to actual labour and produced inputs which in turn resolve into labour and former inputs. Within an enterprise, for example, there were many tasks that had to be performed, such as cleaning, record keeping, and bookkeeping, and repairs, which did not directly contribute to producing and increasing wealth in the sense of making a net addition to it – in other words, such tasks represented a net cost to the enterprise which had to be minimized. There were also whole occupations such as domestic servants, soldiers, schoolteachers, etc. which, although necessary, did not seem "productive" in the sense of increasing the material wealth of a society. Part of the population consumed wealth but did not create it. To maximize economic growth, therefore, "unproductive costs" which consumed part of the total national income rather than adding to it should be minimized; productive labor had to be maximized. Many different economic and moral arguments were made to either justify or else criticize the incomes gained from different activities, on the ground that they were "productive" or "unproductive", "earned" or "unearned", "wealth creating" or "wealth consuming".

In neoclassical economics, the distinction between productive and unproductive labour was however rejected as being largely arbitrary and irrelevant. All the factors of production (land, labour and capital) create wealth and add value; they are all "productive". If the value of a good is just what somebody is its marginal utility, then regarding some activities as value creating and others not is a purely subjective matter; any activity which produces anything, or generates an income, could be considered production and productive, and the only question that remains is how productive it is. This could be measured by striking a ratio between the monetary value of output produced, and the number of hours worked to produce it (or the number of workers who produce it). This is called a "output/labour ratio". The ratio "GDP per capita" is also used by some as an indicator of how productive a population is. However, in calculating any output value, some concept of value is nevertheless required, because we cannot relate, group and aggregate prices (real or notional) at all without using a valuation principle. All accounting assumes a value theory, in this sense we always need to distinguish conceptually the definition of value equivalence, comparable value, value transfer, loss of value, conservation of value and newly created value. For this purpose, a knowledge of prices is ultimately not sufficient, since the decision to group and categorize prices in a certain way involves criteria and valuations which themselves cannot be derived from prices. A persisting management preoccupation, particularly in large corporations, also concerns the question of which activities of a business are value adding. The reason is simply that value adding activities boost gross income and profit margins (note that the "value added" concept is a measure of the net output, or gross income, after deduction of materials costs from the total sales volume). If the aim is to realise maximum shareholder value, two important valuation problems occur. Firstly, productive assets being used in production have no actual market price, being withdrawn from the market and not offered for sale. They have at best an historic cost, but this cost does not apply to inventories of new output produced. The current value of productive assets can therefore be estimated only according to a probable price that they would have, if they were sold, or if they were replaced. Secondly, there is the problem of what exactly the increases or decreases in the value of productive assets being held can be attributed to. In what has become popularly known as "value based management", these problems are pragmatically tackled with the accounting concepts of market value added (MVA) and economic value added (EVA). This style of management focuses very closely on how assets and activities contribute to maximum profit income.

In national accounts and social accounting theory the concepts of productive and unproductive labour do survive to some extent. The first reason is that if we want to estimate and account for the value of the net new output created by a country in a year, we must be able to distinguish between sources of new value added and conserved or transferred value. In other words, we need a value theoretic principle which guides us in relating, grouping and computing price aggregates. It is obvious that if products or incomes are merely exchanged or transferred between A and B, then the total product value, or total income, does not increase; all that has happened here is, that they have been shifted around, and redistributed. Total wealth has not increased, no new value was added. By implication, some activities add new value, others do not. Secondly, it is necessary to create an operational statistical coverage of production itself, which can be used to allocate incomes, activities and transactions in the economy as either belonging to "production", or falling outside "production". Thus, some work produces something in the economic sense, other work does not. In general, national accounts adopt a very wide definition of production; it is defined as any activity of resident "institutional units" (enterprises, public services, households) combining the factors of production (land, labour and capital) to transform inputs into outputs. This includes both market production as well as non market production, if it recognisably generates an income. The advantage of the wide definition is, that practically all flows of production related income can be captured (but at the same time a large amount of unpaid work housework and voluntary work is not accounted for). Nevertheless, some incomes are ruled out of production and regarded as transfers of wealth. A transfer is defined basically as a payment made or income received without providing any good, service or asset in return, for example: government benefits. Some forms of interest on loans, some property rents, and most capital gains on financial assets and property are also excluded, they are effectively transfers (flows of income and expenditure which are regarded as unrelated to production and to the value of new output) or intermediate expenditure. Thirdly, national accounts will show the contribution of different economic sectors to the total national product or national income. These sectors are mainly output defined (e. g. agriculture, manufacturing, business services, government administration). It is therefore possible to distinguish to some extent between "productive" activities producing some tangible product or service, and other commercial or government activities which do not (yet generate incomes). A large amount of work done in society is not captured in national accounts, because it is unpaid voluntary labour or unpaid household labour. The monetary value of this work can be estimated only from time use surveys. Thus, national accounting definitions of "production" are strongly biased towards activities which yield a money income.

The ecological critique focuses on mindless "production for production's sake", attacking both the neoclassical notion and the Marxist concept of "productiveness". It is argued neoclassical economics can understand the value of anything (and therefore the costs and benefits of an activity) only if it has a price, real or imputed. However, physical and human resources may have a value which cannot be expressed in price terms, and to turn them into an object of trade via some legal specification of property rights may be harmful to human life on earth. Activities may have non priced costs and benefits which never feature on the balance sheet, at most in propaganda and advertising. The Marxian view is also dismissed by ecologists, because it argues only human labour time is the substance and source of economic value in capitalist society. Again, it is argued a very restricted idea of economic value is being operated with by Marxists. In part, this misses Marx's own point, namely that it was not him, but the growth of commercial trade which made labour exploitation the fulcrum of wealth creation. Nevertheless, the ecological argument is that for the sake of a healthy future and a sustainable biosphere, a new valuation scheme for people and resources needs to be adopted. The core of this critique is clearly an ethical one: all the existing economic theories provide no healthy norms that would ensure correct stewardship for the environment in which all people have to live. Markets provide no moral norms of their own apart from the law of contract. To develop a better concept of "productiveness" would require a new morality, a new view of human beings and the environment in which they live, so that harmful economic activity can be outlawed, and healthy alternatives promoted. Ecologists typically distinguish between "good" and "bad" market trade and production. Some believe capitalism can "go green" (producing in an environmentally friendly way), and that capitalism is "cleaner" than Soviet type socialism. Others think that capitalism cannot "go green" because of the nature of the beast; so long as human accounting is done in terms of private costs and private profits, many "external effects" (externalities) will be disregarded, and at most legal restrictions and taxation can limit the environmental damage somewhat.