> "The capitalist, as representative of capital engaged in its valorisation process - productive capital - performs a productive function, which consists precisely in directing and exploiting productive labour.
Marx distinguishes in the manuscripts of Das Kapital between what he calls the "functioning capitalist" or entrepreneur and coupon clippers, and he regards the technical organisation and coordination of production as a productive force. Thus, for Marx, the management function was always a two-edged issue; a technical division of work between "thinkers" and "doers" or between "co-ordinating" and "executive" functions was often technically necessary for productive efficiency (we cannot all do everything, and must co-operate to maximise results), but this technical division of work (specialisation) was interlaced with a social division of work, which had nothing to do with any technical requirements, but rather with power-relations and the private appropriation of net profits. In the personality structure of the individual, these two sides are combined in the concept of "responsibility", which denotes both technical skill and a personal moral development enabling leadership in organising people to do things, i.e. a degree of self-management or self-determination, which enables the management of others. However, the concept of responsibility in civil society is not "neutral", but has an inevitable moral-political dimension, because of structural class conflict and competition in capitalist society among employers, between employers and employees, and between employees. Since, however, under capitalism the economising of work is subordinated to the imperative of realising and privately appropriating the maximum possible surplus-values through market sales, as net income, it frequently becomes difficult to distinguish clearly between "technically indispensable" specialisations, and modes of organising production which owe their characteristics mainly to the imperative of the private appropriation of wealth, or to power relations deriving from the ownership and control of private or publicly owned assets. That is to say, "market competition" can be as much a constraint on the development of the productive powers of creative human work as an incentive or stimulus to develop them further, and this creates new categories in the division of work, exclusively concerned with the defence and realisation of surplus-values, as net income entitlements. I am using the term "creative human work" in the broad cultural sense - i.e. human culture includes everything humans have made, in contrast to that provided by nature. A bricklayer "creates" just as much as an artist does, he creates pavements instead of sculptures maybe, but it is creative work anyhow. I also use the expression "private appropriation of net profits" deliberately, since this appropriation is as much a question of relations of production (ownership entitlements) as of relations of distribution (access entitlements to functions and occupations which permit this appropriation, and functions concerned with the realisation of surplus-values in trading). "Professionalisation" processes in capitalist society can show similarities to the medieval guild system, i.e. rules of inclusion and exclusion are enforced which (1) protect incomes, (2) prevent certain social classes from entry into occupations, and thus from certain types of income entitlements. "Free markets" such as envisaged in Marx's model of a purified capitalism are hypothetical, basically a bourgeois myth, the question is really more how exactly markets are regulated (i.e. what legal and enforcement rules apply). Simply put, the thought of Aristotle and Plato was based on slave-labour, without which they would not have had the time to philosophise. Nevertheless, part of the thought of Aristotle and Plato proved of enduring value, so much so, that we still refer to their ideas today. The fact that we do so, does not constitute a justification of slave labour. But it does affirm that such a mental-manual division of labour could produce constructive results, whatever the oppression, which could not be have been achieved if everybody had to do everything it takes to survive for himself. Naturally, the rich and the tyrants will always argue slaves are necessary, and they will justify that e.g. by saying that some people are just stupid or defective, they haven't got what it takes, or they just want to be slaves. But socialists think that stupidity or intelligence is something that humans produce or reduce, rather than something which is just natural. It's a result of civilisation and emancipation processes. The more pertinent conclusion to draw, is that the achievement of human progress depends crucially on teamwork, on cooperation. When bourgeois ideologues extol the virtues of competition, they don't know what they are talking about. Because to engage in private competition at all, already presupposes an enormous amount of co-operation between people, a lot of it unpaid (for example, female "labour of love", and spying by the rich, to obtain knowledge without paying for it; as I have said previously, capitalism and class society is always based on getting something for nothing, and hence people must be forced into a specific understanding and validation of human love). What Marx regarded as ultimately the progressive characteristic of marketisation, was the objective socialisation of production, even if this is not yet institutionally acknowledged as socialism. In other words, the internationalisation of trading relations creates a complex network and infrastructure of human interdependencies and connections, that forms the basis of the next step in human evolution, unless the infrastructure for it is destroyed through wars. The interpretation of management just mentioned reflected Marx's concept of the "social surplus product" as being both (1) technically, the social accumulation fund or investment fund necessary in any type of society as the source of expanded reproduction (economic growth) and (2) socially, a surplus appropriated by the ruling classes as gross income by virtue of ownership entitlements (under capitalism, an appropriation of private profit). I.e., it involves both a technical relationship and a class relationship, such that the magnitude of the surplus product depends not just on the productivity of work, given tools & technology, but also on a class relationship and ownership relations, enforcing a specific division of the new incomes generated from production and trade between social classes (this concept is discussed at length in E. Mandel, Marxist Economic Theory). Marx (and subsequently N. Bukharin, R. Luxemburg and P. Baran) then judged the relative historical "progressiveness" of the elites in terms of what they actually did with the surplus, i.e. what part was re-invested to develop the productive or destructive forces, and what part was consumed, and how it was consumed or squandered. This is a theme in Marx's discussion of the "reconversion of surplus-values into capital" upon realisation, which is not simply a question of relative profitability, but also of the political-cultural predilections and circumstances of the owning classes, who have their own culture, human concerns and political stance. Implicitly, Marx suggests that by enabling a clear distinction between production of output as such, and the accumulation of private capital, the capitalist mode of production for the first time in history clarifies very precisely the economic principles of the economising of work involved, principles which in previous modes of production could not be so clearly specified, among other things because "the economy" did not exist as a distinct and separate sphere of civil society or in social ideology. It does so (1) by objectifying economic relations as market relations, expressed in money-prices, and (2) through a process of specialisation, which increasingly separates out production functions and transactional functions, clearly defining them as the exclusive function of different people. Indeed, part of the "alienation of work" consists in the fact that a job as a narrow specialisation cannot express all that one is, it is frequently impossible to express or realise one's individual nature in work, and work defines or shapes personal identity less and less, regardless of the issue of whether that's good or bad. This is, for Marx, a result of the imbalanced development of humankind, which the rather anarchic, competitive, capitalistically regulated world market promotes: higher human needs are cultivated which go beyond the social framework in which they can be satisfactorily met, while more basic needs are not met at all, i.e. superdevelopment here, combines with underdevelopment there, to the point where humans in different areas of the world can scarcely recognise each other as "human" anymore, because their levels of personal development are so far apart. The movement towards communism is essentially a process of the transformation of the division of work inherited from the past, according to new allocative principles, emphasising balanced human development, satisfaction of the basic structure of human needs, egalitarianism and an open society, stewardship of the biosphere which is the basis of life, and the maximisation of human freedom (not just freedom from constraints, but freedom expressed such that it frees others, as well as oneself). The process starts at the personal level, with the will to break with narrow capitalistic depictions of economic rationality, and culminates at the organised social-political level, with a better stewardship of resources according to goals of human development, rather than narrow self-enrichment at the expense of others. This requires increasing the responsibility level of the proletariat and the peasantry in the defined way. Let's just have a brief look at the structure of the total population of US capitalist society in 2002, in approximate figures showing different broad occupational categories, ranked according to the number of people in them (this does not pretend to be a completely scientifically exact analysis, I'm not paid to do that). Then you can better understand and question for yourself, which and how much of those categories are really technically necessary or inevitable, to economise optimal human development, and which categories are more just a product of the existence of social classes, private accumulation of capital, and the market allocation of resources. First of all, let us derive the basic employment categories in approximate figures: American total resident population 288 million population (16+) 224 million economically active population 218 million total civilian non-institutional population (16+) 215 million population 16-65 years 188 million civilian labour force in 2002 = 145 million employed civilian labour force 137 million Unpaid family workers 0.03 million employers 10 million (4.9 million distinct firms, 7 million establishments) self-employed (farm) 1 million selfemployed (non-farm) 9 million wage & salary earners 136 million employees 127 million government employees 20 million private sector workforce 105 million Parttime workers non-farm 27 million Parttime workers farm 0.5 million private sector waged employees 95 million unionised wage earners 18 million Now let's look at the proportions of what this total American population actually does, in approximate figures, basic categories (somebody can do the figures more exactly than I can): Children (under 16, not working for pay) 64 million Retired (over 65, not in the labour force) 28 million Fulltime housewives, house-husbands and idle not working for pay 22 million Industrial production workers 26.2 million Managers and executives 15.8 million Clerical and administrative workers 15.3 million Sales workers 15 million Reserve army of unemployed 13 million Engineers, architects, technicians, programmers and scientists 10.5 million Employers of workers, all kinds 9.8 million Supervisors of workers, all kinds 9.1 million Teachers, professional childcare workers and paid childcare assistants 8 million Transport workers 5 million Unskilled labourers, handlers and helpers 4.8 million Aides, ushers, guides, orderlies, and attendants 4.8 million Personal care, health and medical workers 4.3 million Cleaners, janitors, private cooks, maids & housekeepers 3.7 million Accountants, auditors, underwriters, and financial officers 2.6 million Adults in institutional care n.e.c. 2.5 million Specialists & consultants in human resources, PR and labour relations 2.1 million Prison & jail inmates 2 million Artists, entertainers & designers, photographers, professional athletes, recreational services 1.6 million Nursing home residents 1.6 million Fulltime criminals and lumpenised, not in corrective institutions 1.5 million Lawyers, judges and legal assistants 1.3 million Therapists, counselors, social workers and welfare service aides 1.2 million Police, detective, and law enforcement officers 1.2 million Medical doctors, dentists, vetinarians, optometrists, and podiatrists 1.1 million Military personnel, domestic 1.1 million Groundskeepers, gardeners, animal caretakers (non-farm) 1.1 million Security guards 1 million Farmers 1 million Prostitutes 1 million Working children (under 16) 1 million Inspectors (construction, production and compliance) 0.9 million Editors, writers, reporters, proofreaders, librarians, archivists, and curators 0.6 million Adult hospital patients 0.5 million Religious clergy, and employees of religious institutions 0.4 million Corrective institution & prison officers 0.3 million Firefighting, fire prevention and pest control workers 0.3 million Water, sewage and electricity workers 0.2 million Hospice inpatients 0.1 million Adult psychiatric patients 0.2 million (for a sociological discussion of the theoretical need to develop concepts in order to move towards making an analysis of the division of labour in the future, see http://itsa.ucsf.edu/~eliotf/Conceiving_of_Divisions_of.html ). In Marx's lifetime, the "joint-stock company" wasn't as widespread as it is today, i.e. the division between the actual direction of production and the ownership of the private assets that give entitlement to profit income, creating a long "chain" of claimants to profit income, from those who control the productive assets, to those who are far removed from the process, just wasn't so extensive. I have previously posted on PEN-L an example of the nickel industry, where it's clear, that there is a division in the owning classes participating in that industry, between "functioning capitalists", money-managers and coupon-clippers far removed from the scene. As regards the discussion about the law of value in China, the Chinese are primarily interested in transcending material poverty in their country, and who can blame them. So they look at economics, primarily from the point of view of the efficiency and effectiveness of production of new wealth, and the maximisation of output that can satisfy consumer needs. To the extent that they have opted for capitalist methods, this has a lot to do with (1) their dependence on superior production technologies developed outside China, (2) pressures from the world market and the capitalist class, (3) the cultural development of the Chinese masses, and (4) with bureaucratic excesses, due to a monopolisation of power by the CCP. In the 1980s, this led to the abandonment of the "iron rice bowl" and the introduction of the "responsibility system", rather than far-reaching socialist democratisation of civil society. In other words, a narrow view of material and moral incentives was adopted. The "cultural revolution" had attempted to abolish the division of labour by sending intellectuals and artists into the countryside, but that obviously didn't work, even if some people benefited from getting their hands dirty with some manual work. Responsibility can of course be encouraged in various ways - through the incentive of private income entitlement resulting from privately-held assets, through systems of efficient majority rule, through culture wars which develop the independent, self-acting powers of human beings, and so on. It's very much a political question, and not just a cultural or economic question - morality spans all these spheres. I already referred to the ambiguity of the concept of responsibility: it combines both technical ability to manage and moral-political ability to manage, in other words, self-management and management of others are things which must develop together, and then the question is, what the best ways of encouraging that are, and what the obstacles to that are. It is easy to bury that discussion in a pile of ideological nonsense. Bureaucratic excesses (red tape, repression, arbitrariness) create demoralisation, and a lack of incentive or motivation for creative work that improves human wellbeing, a lack of individual initiative and entrepreneurial capacity, and then people think capitalist methods are the only alternative, which of course isn't true, that is really more a question of power relations and politics. Capitalism is just as good at stifling individual initiative, because initiative is only allowed if it is compatible with capital accumulation, and doesn't detract too much from it. Women's voluntary labour usually isn't counted as "initiative". Bureaucracies are basically constituted either on the basis of a monopolised asset ownership, or a legally or a religiously constituted monopoly of legislative and executive power, and usually this involves control over communication and information. In some cases, capitalists methods may be the only alternative, even simply just to break through bureaucratic jungles and restore a rationally allocated responsibility in individuals, but, the advantage of the Chinese system, in which the state regulates the economy, is that at least it permits experimentation with different allocative methods, to see what works best (cf. Makoto Itoh, Political Economy of Socialism). The question in China is really whether the issues of alternative allocative methods can be intelligently discussed, or whether this discussion is brutally repressed, and for this, some kind of democracy or free expression is obviously necessary. If you cannot even discuss a problem, then you are unlikely to be able solve it either, in most cases, precisely because you have to co-operate to do it, and you cannot do that very well, if people make you dumb and deaf. However, Westerners often operate with a fake concept of Chinese democracy as well, their democracy is different from ours, and our own democracy is in some respects less meaningful than theirs. Democratic rhetoric from businessmen is usually a call for freedom for self-enrichment at the expense of others. Thus, democracy is good if it enriches one-self, anything that doesn't, is "undemocratic". The problematic of bureaucratisation was extensively discussed by European socialists and Marxists (see Catherine Samary's useful summary, Plan, Market & Democracy, an IIRE Notebook, not cited by Makoto Itoh). Economic rationality resulting from bureaucratisation can be far worse, than economic irrationality resulting from market economy, but this discussion cannot be separated from the politics of social classes and their interests, and if it is, then no clear conclusions can be drawn, because the biophysical-technical-scientific problems of economising resources, and the social-political problems involving conflicts of class and sectional interests are confused with each other. Alec Nove correctly pointed out that "workers democracy" is not the perfect vaccination against bureaucracy that Marxists often think it is. To operate democracy again requires administration and a technology. The real problem is different: it concerns the invention of modes of mass participation, which really work well, and are efficient. This requires a combination of different sciences - decisions must always be made at an appropriate level, i.e. you don't normally require a parliament to design a bus timetable, that decision has to be made by bus workers. It's a question of efficiently allocating the making of decisions concerning the management of society's resources. Decisionmaking processes in capitalist society which work well should be kept, those that are inefficient and ineffective should be replaced. What is often ignored in public discussion is that in capitalist society, bureaucracy is a far bigger problem in private enterprise than in government, and we can illustrate this, by noting that out of a total number of about 15.3 million clerical and administrative workers in the USA, only about 1.3 million are government workers, the rest are in the private sector. Since the bulk of these private sector workers are employed by corporations, you can easily see that corporate bureaucracy is far bigger than government bureaucracy, even although government bureaucracy is the largest single employer. The Cato Institute may rail against "government red tape" but corporate bureaucracy is a far bigger issue. If you have 18.3 thousand central corporate, subsidiary, & regional managing office establishments (2000 figures) employing 2.6 million people, this by no means exhausts the specifically administrative (financial and non-financial) work that corporations actually do. And that work employs another 10 million clerical and administrative employees. Here's some employment data on the government officialdom in the USA in 2002: Total government employees 18.2 million (grand total 19.8 million fulltime + parttime + casual + contractors) Total local govt employees 11.4 million (fulltime equivalents) Total state govt employees 5 million Total federal employees 1.8 (domestic & overseas) Composition of federal officialdom (broad occupational categories): Professional 433.5 thousand Administrative 596.6 thousand Technical 395.2 thousand Clerical 150.2 thousand Other White Collar 56.4 thousand Blue Collar 210.8 thousand (Unspecified 870 employees) Composition of state government officialdom: Financial Administration 173.5 thousand Central Administration 61.5 thousand Judicial & Legal 164.2 thousand Police Total 106.5 thousand Other public services 4.6 million Composition of local government officialdom: financial administration 213.5 thousand central administration 216 thousand judiciary and legal staff 244.7 thousand police apparatus 782.6 thousand Other public services 9.9 million I recall that actor-president Ronald Reagan once compared Soviet agriculture with American agriculture, in terms of the amount of workers it took to produce an output, and he felt that this was absolute proof of the superiority of capitalist agriculture, because even although the Russians needed much more workers, they were importing grain. There is indeed some truth in this. For example, Kruschev's agricultural policy of cultivating "virgin lands" was in great part an ecological disaster - in some areas, the burning of vegetation to create arable land, meant that the top soil just blew away in the wind, so that nothing could be planted and cultivated anymore. Sensible ecological thinking and rural sensitivity was not part of official Marxist-Leninist dogma. In places like Kazakhstan, this caused environmental devastation on a scale so great, that the cost involved in repairing it probably cannot be met for many generations. It had nothing to do with Marx either, as various Marxian scholars have proved with chapter and verse. But the problem is much more complex than Reagan, as an apologist for the American elite, can admit. We have to consider not just (1) Stalin's inhuman, anti-socialist, forced collectivisation of the peasantry, which murdered masses of people unnecessarily and without provocation, and (2) the faulty policy of over-emphasising heavy industry at the expense of workers' consumption, so that the elite might shop in special shops, but also (3) problems of technological dependence, (4) climatic conditions, (5) soil fertility and infrastructure, (6) imperialist blockades and aggression, (7) the cultural level of the agricultural population, (8) the human and economic starting level from which an attempt at socialist modernisation began, (9) the initial land ownership system that needed to be transformed, and (10) the political repression of peasant parties. For example, to get capitalist agriculture going in the USA, a genocide of the Indians was necessary. In the Russian Empire, you couldn't do that, because the majority of the population were peasants. Jurriaan (in memoriam J. Tinbergen)
