Productive Labor and Labor That Generates Value

V. A. Bazarov (Vladimir Aleksandrovich Rudnev, 1874-1939) was a Russian Marxist philosopher and economist and Social-Democratic revolutionary who published this work in 1899.It will be of interest to students of Marxist theory, since Bazarov argues that Marx's distinction between "productive labor" (which creates surplus value) and "unproductive labor" (which is paid at the expense of surplus value) is invalid. Instead, the author asserts that "production is the totality of processes that are necessary in the given society for preservation of its life," that all human activity that does so deserves the term "labor" and is in fact "productive labor."It will also be of interest to scholars who are engaged with the thought of Alexander Bogdanov, since, in the introduction to the second edition of Bogdanov's Short Course of Economic Science, he declared that "I was able to a significant degree to make use of V. Bazarov's work, Productive Labor and Labor that Generates Value, in which the concept of 'production, ' which is basic to the social sciences, is monistically established."The book contains an introduction, which briefly discusses the relationship of Bazarov and Bogdanov, and an appendix which consists of the biography of V. A. Bazarov taken from "Figures of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia.