(a) Those concerned with the disciplining of the workforce and ensuring it works flat out-expenditures on internal security, supervisory labour and time and motion measurement, checking on work speeds.
(b) Those concerned with keeping the allegiance of the workforce, eg expenditures on internal public relations, works bulletins, management-run works committees, subsidies to works sports teams.
(c) Those devoted to financial transactions, obtaining credit, bank charges, etc.
(d) Those devoted to sales, advertising, etc.
(e) Those concerned with keeping the workforce fit and able to work-company medical facilities, factory canteens, etc, in some cases the provision of housing for the workforce.
(f) Those concerned with training the workforce-what mainstream economists often call "human capital" .
(g) Expenditures on research and development.
Expenditures (a) and (b) are unambiguously unproductive. They create nothing and are only concerned with getting the maximum of already created value from the workers. Expenditures (c) and (d) are unproductive from the point of view of capital in general. They do not in any way add to the capacity of the system as whole to accumulate. But the individual firm can regard them as productive in the same way as Marx wrote that the individual merchant capitalist did-they serve to get control of surplus value which would otherwise go to rival firms. So advertising expenditure, for example, may be seen by the firm, like expenditure on new equipment, as a way of expanding its position in the market, of forestalling attempts to enter the market by other capitalists, and so on. Similar expenditure on patents and patent protection may be seen as a way of getting a stranglehold on the market (I will return to the other types of expenditures (e) to (g) below).
The growth of state expenditures in the course of the last century has involved states taking over partial responsibility for many of these outlays from the hands of the private capitals based in their national territory. So state expenditures can be broken down into categories playing the same or analogous functions to the expenditures of firms.
There are those expenditures which are clearly unproductive in terms of accumulation throughout the system as a whole.
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond