labour", able to enter the active labour force when the system undergoes periodic expansion (and in the meantime exercising a downward pressure on wages), a surplus population in whose survival it has no real interest apart from that of warding off re bellion and preventing a demoralising impact on the employed working class. The history of welfare legislation over the last 180 years has been a history of attempts to separate that provision which is necessary for capital in the same way that wage payments are and that which is unnecessary but forced on it by its need to contain popular discontent. This finds expression in repeated debates among those who would manage national capitalisms over how welfare policy interacts with labour market policy, among mainstream economists about the "natural" or "non-inflationary" level of unemployment, and among sociologists and social work theorists about the "underclass". The division between social expenditures that are in some way productive for capital and those that are non-productive cuts across some of the normal ways of dividing up national budgets. So education is both training for productive labour and also training for unproductive forms of labour (eg in sales promotion or finance) and the inculcation of bourgeois ideological values. Health services and unemployment benefits both keep the workforce fit and ready to provide labour power and are mechanisms for maintaining social cohesion by providing at least minimal provision for the old, the infirm and the long-term unemployed. These ambiguities become important whenever capital finds the costs of state provision begin to cut into profit rates. At such points states come under the same pressure as do big capitals when faced with sudden competition-the pressure to restructure and reorganise their operations so as to accord with the law of value. On the one side this means trying to impose work measurement and payment schemes on welfare sector employees similar to those within the most competitive industrial firms. On the other side it means cuts in welfare provision so as to restrict it as much as possible to servicing labour power that is necessary for capital accumulation-and doing so in such a way that those who provide this labour power are prepared to do so at the wages they are offered. These pressures grow as managing labour power becomes more important for the state. In the process, employees working
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Understanding the System: Marx and Beyond