Among these are those concerned with protecting property, maintaining social discipline and ensuring the smooth reproduction of class relations; maintaining state-run or financed forms of maintaining popular allegiance to the system, such as state produced propaganda and subsidies to religious institutions; the perpetuation of the ruling ideology through sections of the educational system; maintaining the financial infrastructure of the system through the printing of national currencies and running central banks.
Alongside these there are expenditures beneficial to nationally based capitals in competition with foreign capitals, but which, like the individual capitalists' expenditure on marketing or advertising, do not add to accumulation as a whole. This includes military expenditure, spending on export promotion schemes, negotiations with other governments over international trade and investment regulations, etc.
It was these unproductive expenditures that Marx referred to when he wrote:
Political economy in its classical period, like the bourgeoisie itself in its parvenu phase, adopted a severely critical attitude to the machinery of the state etc. At a later stage it realised and learnt from experience that the necessity for classes which were totally unproductive arose from its own organisation.19
Such growth in unproductive expenditures came to have a big impact on the dynamic of the system after Marx's death.
Waste output and the system's dynamic
Marx hinted at one important point about non-productive labour in his first attempt at a draft for Capital, the Grundrisse. He includes among the "moments" that can delay the rise in the organic composition of capital and the fall in the rate of profit:
the transformation of a great part of capital into fixed capital which does not serve as agency of direct production; unproductive waste of a great portion of capital etc (productively employed capital is always replaced doubly, in that the posing of a productive capital presupposes a countervalue). The unproductive consumption of capital replaces it on one side, annihilates it on the other . . . <sup>20</sup>
State Spending and the System
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