Mike Ballard,
In the capitalist division of labour, what is "productive" labour at the
micro level is not necessarily productive at the macro-level, since the
labour that creates profit for its employer may not be a net addition to the
total mass of new surplus value generated (because it does not create a net
new addition to the stock of new commodities produced). All sorts of things
are traded for profit, but just because that is so, does not automatically
mean that new value comes out of it.
As I explained before, in the typical Marxist model there is only production
- there are only inputs and outputs of production. So accumulation in this
model consists of surplus value being created in production, realized as
profit, and then being reinvested in additional production, so that the
capital stock grows. That is what Marxists call accumulation. Everything
else they regard as "fictitious".
But in the real world, the accumulation process does not work quite that
way. In the real world, the accumulation process results among other things
in a growing stock of durables, fixed assets and financial assets which is
neither an input nor an output of production. You can verify this quite
easily from asset and stock data.
Henryk Grossmann, the super-revolutionary guru feted by the "orthodox
Marxist liberals" these days, forgot about all that in his reproduction
models. Most Marxists in fact simply ignored this, and they call it a
"fictitious" accumulation, but it is not fictitious at all. You get a
statistically large accumulation of non-productive assets, and that asset
base has to be maintained as well. And thus - this is the relevant point
here - the division of labour is modified, because an increasing fraction of
the total labour available becomes concerned, qua function, purely with
maintaining already existing property, and not with creating new assets.
So the employment of labour can be commercially propitious, without creating
net new value in the economy.
A simple example might be, that it takes labour to maintain an asset, since
without that labour, the value of the asset would deteriorate. Thus, the
labour cost is necessary, because it prevents the depreciation of the asset.
But this labour does not create net new value, it merely conserves existing
value. It makes commercial sense for two reasons: the labour cost incurred
is less than the loss of value that would occur if the labour was not done;
and, if the asset is maintained, it can be used to generate profit with the
aid of other labour. Thus, the unproductive labour can be supplied to an
employer on a profit basis, by another employer who makes money from it,
even although it does not create any net new value.
In the finished version of his theory of productive labour in Capital Vol.
1, Marx concludes that:
1. the general category of capitalistic productive labour is a purely
social one, it depends entirely on what the employment relationship is, and
nothing else.
2. There is no class-neutral definition of the productiveness of
labour, in depends on point of view and position.
Thus, as Marx says explicitly with his example of a schoolmaster, the very
same "unproductive" activity which is performed by a self-employed operator
becomes capitalistically "productive", if it is performed for an employer
who gets profit out of it (the surplus-labour is converted into surplus
value and profit).
It therefore does not matter at all, Marx implies, what exactly the nature
of the activity is, or what use-value it produces, all that matters is
whether an employer can realize a profit from the labour he employs for the
activity. And theoretically that is quite true.
But in practice of course that is not quite true, because there are real
physical, social and financial limits ("externalities") to be reckoned with.
The division of labour is not a Marxist-bureaucratic abstraction, but a
specific living reality.
1. One sort of physical limit is, that human life has physical and
biological preconditions which have to be reproduced, regardless of whether
doing that creates profit or not. Another sort of physical limit is, that
there may be technological obstacles for converting labour into
capitalistically productive labour. Labour which was productive can become
unproductive because it has become technologically obsolete. There are also
varieties of labour which are intrinsically very difficult to turn into
capitalist productive labour, for example original artwork.
2. There are social limits arising out of human co-existence in society
- there are pressures from both social cooperation and from competition in
bourgeois society, which result in a division of labour that is not optimal
from an employer's point of view, but necessary from the standpoint of
bourgeois society as a whole, or contingently necessary, given how the state
of things happens to be. Property rights can get in the way of converting
labour into productive labour. There are also financial limits:
contingently, it may be cheaper, more efficient or more profitable to use a
supply of non-productive or non-capitalist labour rather than
capitalistically productive labour to perform various tasks. For example,
the cost of training workers can be prohibitive for an enterprise, and if
the state provides it, that may be the only way to do it, even although, in
the long term, public education can be converted into a business creating
private profit, once it is up and running. If it is not feasible to get wage
labour for an industry, it may be possible to get some slave labour, or
indentured labour, to do the work.
So the actual evolution of the bourgeois division of labour occurs through
an interplay between quite a few different forces and imperatives. In part,
it develops spontaneously, but in part it is also regulated, or it is an
outcome of political fights and political decisions. It can even be partly
the outcome of widespread beliefs about what is best for citizens.
Nevertheless the basic developmental logic remains the same - the general
tendency is, to convert labour into capitalistically employed labour which
enables the employer to appropriate surplus labour, and turn it into profit.
At that point, we are back to where the story started: "productive" labour
at the micro-level (because it generates profit) is not necessarily
"productive" at the macro-level. An activity may generate profit, without
expanding the total mass of new surplus value, because it does not create
new commodities which can be appropriated for sale.
Here most Marxists throw their hands in the air, because it means that there
is no neat-and-tidy bureaucratic concept for them to pontificate about, and
because it contradicts their "fundamentalist Marxist theorem" according to
which all profit is surplus value.
But in reality - stripping away the Marxist bullshit - what we are dealing
with, is a contradiction of bourgeois society itself: bourgeois society
itself is unable to finally reconcile what is "productive" for the
individual and what is "productive" for society, not even with accounting
tricks. Being a "productive" worker is ironically in the end a misfortune,
as Marx says, because you only produce stuff you do not need, so that
somebody else (for example a rich Marxist academic) can enrich himself out
of that.
J.
_______________________________________________
pen-l mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
