But labour power is not an object like other commodities, which are passive as they are bought and sold. It is the living expression of human beings. What from a capitalist point of view is "recuperation of labour power" is for the worker the chance for relaxation, enjoyment and creativity. There is a struggle over the social wage just as over the normal wage, even if both are, to a certain degree, necessary for capital.
The problem is compounded from capital's point of view by the fact that not all welfare provision is in any sense productive. A good portion of it is concerned solely with maintaining the existing relations of exploitation. Studies of the schooling of working class children in the 19th century emphasise the degree to which what was involved was not education in skills so much as inculcating into them discipline and respect for authority.38 Not until late in the 1 9th century did a concern with basic skills for the workforce begin to become a central preoccupation for British capitalism facing foreign competition.39 Today disciplines like economics and sociology are about trying to reproduce bourgeois ideology, while others like accountancy are concerned with the unproductive redistribution of surplus value among members of the capitalist class.
If capital has no choice but to tolerate these unproductive "expenses of production", there are other elements in welfare expenditure it would love to be able to do without and does its utmost to minimise. These go to those who are not needed as labour power (the long-term unemployed without needed skills) or are incapable of providing it (the chronic sick and disabled). It has a similar attitude to provision for the mass of the elderly, but is restrained to some degree by its need to give the impression to currently employed workers that their future is assured. Marx pointed out that there exists, alongside the "reserve army of
State Spending and the System
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