I quoted Marx on services as follows:
"Thus, because the specific relation of labour and capital is not contained
at all in this purchase of services; because it has either been completely
extinguished or was never present, it is naturally the favourite form used
by Say, Bastiat and their associates to express the relation of capital and
labour."
As an aside, I think it is worth mentioning that Marx was thinking here
mainly about personal services, and that he modified his idea somewhat when
he prepared Capital Vol. 1 for publication.
Thus, his analysis of the paid work process provided there provides a much
more sophisticated analysis of the real subsumption of human work by
capital, and subsequently, in discussing value-augmentation through
production, Marx writes e.g. that "Capitalist production is not merely the
production of commodities, it is essentially the production of
surplus-value. The worker produces, not for himself, but for capital. It no
longer suffices, therefore, that he should simply produce. He must produce a
surplus-value. That worker is productive only, who produces surplus-value
for the capitalist, and therefore works for the valorisation of capital. If
we may take an example from outside the sphere of production of material
objects, a schoolmaster is a productive worker when, in addition to
belabouring the heads of his schholars, he works like a horse to enrich the
school proprietor. That the latter has laid out his capital in a teaching
factory, instead of in a sausage factory, does not change the relation.
Hence the concept of productive work doesn't simply imply a relationship
between work and useful effect (a service being defined as the useful effect
of a use-value - JB), between the worker and the output of work, but also a
specific, social relation of production, a relation which has sprung up
historically and stamps the worker as the direct means of creating a
surplus-value."
The specific investigation of services was never advanced very much in
Marxian scholarship beyond generalities, verities and platitudes, in
particular because most authors do not grasp that the problem is about the
specifically capitalist modification of the division of human work, the
restructuring of inputs and outputs to conform to the requirements of
capitalistic value-accretion, and to the pattern of the real subsumption of
human work by Capital.
Ernest Mandel correctly noted that many activities which are called or
statistically classified as "production of services" are really production
of tangible goods, or part of the production of goods (Le troisieme age du
capitalisme). That is really because in the foundational categorisation of
the occupational division of work, statisticians lack a theoretical basis or
scientific analysis of social relations, and hence, the categorisation made
is descriptive, it is based just on the actual occupational divisions which
there actually are, and which of course are modified over time, so that,
over time, some additional divisions are added to the classification etc.
and at some point the classification has to be drastically revised.
But Ernest Mandel also likes to use the concept of "veralgemeinte
warenproduktion" ("generalised commodity production") to describe the
capitalist mode of production. While this formula is useful to describe the
universalisation of market relations, it does not however do real justice to
Marx's contention, stated in the quote I mentioned, that "Capitalist
production is not merely the production of commodities, it is ESSENTIALLY
the production of the Mehwert." What is essential for Marx, to be precise,
is the transformation of human work into a value-accretion process, under
conditions where the increment can be privately appropriated by someone
else. So it is not really Marx who has a "labour theory of value", it is
rather capitalism itself, which transforms human work into a commercial
value, as Diane Elson pointed out once.
This qualification by Marx which I just stated is also the basis for Tony
Cliff's idea that the USSR must have been "state capitalist" (a bureaucratic
elite extracting a surplus from production) giving rise to a whole sectarian
or apologetic dispute about the social nature of the USSR which doesn't
really contribute very much to solving the problem of socialist transition
and the emancipation of the working classes, i.e. the transformation of
production and exchange relations to create more freedom and efficiency for
all, on an egalitarian basis (and not just for some). The real problem was,
that the bolsheviks came to power without having a clear understanding about
the socialist transformation of Russian society, and therefore, in many
ways, ended up running roughshod over the workers and peasants. Because of
their sentimental attachment to an ideological doctrine, many Marxists
refuse to understand this, and then you get only apologetics presenting
failures as successes, rather than the development of effective theory based
on scientifically gathered facts.
Of course, in a society characterised by social classes, the modalities of
the subordination of workers and peasants for the purpose of the
appropriation of a surplus from their work by other social classes are
variegated, and not at all limited to the specifically capitalist mode of
production Marx describes. The IS position is confusing because (1) it
constantly mixes up problems of the exploitation of classes and strata by
other classes and strata with problems to do with the specific
characteristics of the capitalist mode of production, and (2) it bases its
definitions only on production relations, abstracting from relations of
distribution and consumption, whereas you need to be concerned with all of
these to understand anything about it.
Now, it was very clear to the bourgeois classes of the bourgeois-imperialist
countries that the USSR wasn't capitalist, that's part of the reason they
wanted to fight it, so then, if socialists start to argue that the USSR was
capitalist, then quickly we get into obscurantism, and cannot solve the
problems of socialist transformation of civil society (in general, I think
Mandel's position was better, but you have to get rid of his apologetic
formulations, which derive from the difficulty of trying to uphold a third
campist position during the intense, extremely polarised debates of the Cold
War epoch where serious scientific debate on the basis of facts often was
not possible and drowned in verbiage).
To return to the problem of "services" however: the analytical or conceptual
difficulty for economic science is always in understanding what specifically
the object of trade is, as far as services are concerned. To some, who are
aware of the sophistication of trade relations in the "information age", it
may seem like a joke when I say this, or maybe a sexual pun, but, if you're
really interested in the socialist transformation of society, then you do
have to concern yourself with this problem I think.
It is precisely because the object of trade becomes opaque or more difficult
to understand and the trading relations very complex, that the growth of
services seems to indicate that we are having to contend with a completely
new form of society which is no longer capitalist. And then it's important
to get back to basics and do a real empirical, quantitative investigation,
rather than toss around postmodernist metaphors. I have tried to do this
previously in a very simple way by just looking at the occupational division
of work to see how many people are involved in different categories of work,
what the proportions are.
Market forces just develop the division of work in conformity with the
imperative of value-augmentation irrespective of human needs, interests and
desires, those "things" are only relevant, insofar are they are a means for
value-augmentation and capital accumulation. And since this occurs through a
competitive process, the strong outcompete the weak, in which case, social
inequality continually increases, creating a massive maldistribution of
effective buying power and, while credit bridges the gap, ultimately, it
causes the erosion of the capitalist world market (the imperialist system
tearing itself apart economically, and causing wars over strategic resources
which cannot be claimed any longer other than through brute force).
The wreckers, the detractors, and the enemies of human progress, of course
want to prevent this scientific work and drown scientific inquiry in babble
and verbiage, nevertheless, this work is very important to do, at least if
you are interested in a move forwards of the human species towards a free,
egalitarian society, rather than a move backwards to slave society and
barbarism due to the extremisation of social inequality, i.e. the extreme
divisions the weaknesses and strengths of humanity, as incorporated into
specific wealthy and poor people who can hardly recognise each other anymore
as "human" because their development is so far apart, and so different (the
postmodernist preoccupation with "difference" is, of course, in good part
the ideological reflex of the exascerbation of social inequalities).
Jurriaan
