The ageing of capitalism . . . opened a gulf between the two criteria of productiveness that he [Marx-CH] used interchangeablyemployment by capital and augmenting capital. . . Now that capital is king . . . the two criteria are no longer congruous. Millions of workers are employed directly by capital to produce goods and services which it cannot use for further expansion under any conceivable circumstances. They are productive by one criterion and unproductive by the other... Given the need to choose, productive labour today must be defined as labour whose final output is or can be an input into further production. Only such labour can work for capital's self-expansion . . . To spell it out, in late capitalism only part of the surplus can be used for the expansion of capital. The rest is waste product.15
More recently Alan Freeman has also suggested that the notion of unproductive labour has to be extended to involve the use of labour to produce things that are then used in an unproductive manner. "The workers who decked the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in marble are just as unproductive as the clerks who now walk across it" .16 Guglielmo Carchedi, by contrast, argues there is labour that is productive if it has created new value, even if this does not then contribute anything to the next round of accumulation.17 Regardless of how it is categorised, the proportion of labour that is waste from the point of view of capital accumulation has become enormous. Kidron calculated that "three fifths of the work actually undertaken in the US in the 1 970s was wasted from capital's own point of view" .18
The state sector and non-productive labour
Expenditures by individual capitals that are neither going to capital investment nor to the wages of productive workers can be broken down into different categories:
State Spending and the System
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