The scale of unproductive labour
The level of unproductive expenditures involved in sales and finance grew throughout the 20th century. Anwar Shaikh and Ertugrul Ahmet Tonak calculate that the number of workers employed in trade in the US grew from 10,690,000 in 1948 to 24,375,000 in 1989, and of those in finance and insurance from 1 ,251,000 to 7,123,000. Meanwhile, the number of productive workers only grew from 32,994,000 to 41,148,000.12 Fred Moseley estimates the numbers in commerce as growing from 8.9 to 21 million between 1950 and 1980, and the number in finance from 1.9 to 5.2 million, while the productive workforce only grew from 28 to 40.3 million.13
The figures do not include the large number of managerial employees who Marx regarded as non-productive because they are involved in policing those who actually produce value. Simon Mohun has calculated that the growth in their numbers and remuneration caused the share of "unproductive" wages and salaries in the "material value added" in the US to rise from 35 percent in 1964 to over 50 percent in 2000.14 These figures also understate the total growth of unproductive labour because they do not include employees involved in non-productive state functions like the military and the legal system.
Unproductive expenditures and waste production
There is another sort of labour that also has to be taken into consideration when examining 20th and 21st century capitalism. This is the labour that goes into producing commodities that are sold like other commodities but which do not then re-enter later rounds of production, whether as means of production or as wage goods. The labour producing luxury goods for the capitalist class falls into this category. So too does labour that goes into military weaponry. Although such labour has usually been regarded as "productive" by Marxists, it shares with non-productive labour the fact that it does not add to capitalist accumulation. For these reasons it was argued by Mike Kidron in the early 1 970s that it should also be regarded as non-productive:
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond