To industrial capital the costs of circulation appear as unproductive expenses, and so they are. To the merchant they appear as a source of profit, proportional, given the general rate of profit, to their size. The outlay to be made on these circulation costs is therefore productive investment for mercantile capital. . . And the commercial labour which it buys i s likewise immediately productive for it.10
The competition between commercial capitalists with each other meant that each was subject to the same pressures as the capitalists involved in production to keep wages down to the value of labour power. For this reason their workers were exploited in the same way as workers for capital involved in production. The more a commercial capitalist held down the wages and increased the workload of his employees, the greater was the share he could keep for himself of the payment he got from the productive capitalists for providing services to them. If it took eight hours of socially necessary labour time to perform, say, a certain sales task, but only four hours to cover a sales worker's wage, then the shopkeeping capitalist could pocket four hours worth of the surplus value supplied from elsewhere in the system.
But this did not mean that commercial labour could be equated with productive labour when it came to understanding the dynamics of the system as a whole. One created resources that could be used for further accumulation, and the other did not. That is why Marx is insistent:
Costs which enhance the price of a commodity without adding to its use value, which are therefore to be classed as unproductive expenses so far as society is concerned, may be a source of enrichment to the individual capitalist. On the other hand, as this addition to the price of the commodity merely distributes the costs of circulation equally, they do not cease to be unproductive in character. For instance, insurance companies divide the losses of individual capitalists among the capitalist class. But this does not stop these equalised losses from being losses so far as the aggregate social capital is concerned.11
The distinction between productive and unproductive labour is often seen as a merely scholastic question. But once seen in terms of what contributes to accumulation and what does not, it has enormous implications-including some that Marx himself never developed. What is "productive of surplus value" for the individual capitalist (the definition of productive labour Marx used in his notebooks) is not necessarily what is productive in terms of adding to the surplus value available to capital in general for accumulation. And it is this that is central for the dynamic of the system.
State Spending and the System
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