It is unnecessary either to repeat or to attempt to summarize the description of the changes in capitalism to be found in Monopoly Capital, for obvious reasons, but also because not all the aspects which Baran and Sweezy analyze are of direct interest to us in this discussion. The angle of vision adopted in that work was the view of capitalist society as the producer of a gigantic and growing economic surplus, and the authors were concerned with the way that surplus is used, or “absorbed," in monopoly capitalism. And at the outset, they point out:
We do not claim that directing attention to the generation and absorption of surplus gives a complete picture of this or any other society. And we are particularly conscious of the fact that this approach, as we have used it, has resulted in almost total neglect of a subject which occupies a central place in Marx's study of capitalism: the labor process. We stress the crucial role of technological change in the development of monopoly capitalism but make no attempt to inquire systematically into the consequences which the particular kinds of technological change characteristic of the monopoly capitalist period have had for the nature of work, the composition (and differentiation) of the working class, the psychology of workers, the forms of working-class organization and struggle, and so on. These are all obviously important subjects which would have to be dealt with in any comprehensive study of monopoly capitalism.³
As this makes clear, Baran and Sweezy deal less with the movements of production than with the movements of its outcome, the product. But, as they point out, not only technological change but also a changing product bring about new and different processes of labor, a new occupational distribution of the employed population, and thus a changed working class. It is thus clear that the investigation of the movements of labor undertaken here are but another form of the investigation of the movements of value undertaken in Monopoly Capital.
The process by which the movement of value and the movement of labor go hand in hand was described by Marx in his exposition of the general law of capitalist accumulation:
With accumulation, and the development of the productiveness of labor that accompanies it, the power of sudden expansion of capital grows also. . . . The mass of social wealth, overflowing with the advance of accumulation, and transformable into additional capital, thrusts itself frantically into old branches of production, whose market suddenly expands, or into newly formed branches. . . . In all such cases, there must be the possibility of throwing great masses of men\* suddenly on the decisive points without injury to the scale of production in other spheres. . . . This increase is effected by the simple process that constantly “sets free" a part of the labourers; by methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the increased production.
Considered on the scale of the century that has passed since Marx, the “methods which lessen the number of labourers employed in proportion to the, increased production" have “set free” workers in vast numbers. The figures for the United States, which are by no means untypical of the major capitalist countries, indicate, as we have already pointed out, that employment in the nonfarm industries devoted to the production of goods began in the 1920s to drop from its traditional 45 to 50 percent of urban employment, and had fallen to 33 percent by 1970. But at the same time the proportion of the working population occupied in agriculture, which amounted to approximately 50 percent in 1880, had by 1970 sunk to less than 4 percent of total employment. Since agriculture, together with manufacturing, construction, and their accompanying extractive industries, occupied three-fourths of the population in 1880 and by 1970 had fallen to only about three-eighths, the mass of labor to be traced is indeed huge; millions of jobs for those who, “freed" from agriculture and “freed” from manufacturing industries, are nevertheless occupied in some way in the social division of labor. In tracing this mass of labor, we will be led not only to “newly formed branches of production" in Marx's sense, but also, as were Baran and Sweezy, into branches of nonproduction, entire industries and large sectors of existing industries whose only function is the struggle over the allocation of the social surplus among the various sectors of the capitalist class and its dependents. In this process, capital which “thrusts itself frantically" into every possible new area of investment has totally reorganized society, and in creating the new distribution of labor has created a social life vastly different from that of only seventy or eighty years ago. And this restless and insatiable activity of capital continues to transform social life almost daily before our eyes, without heed that by doing so it is creating a situation in which social life becomes increasingly impossible.
The surplus we seek, because it is a surplus of labor rather than of value, is somewhat different from the surplus Baran and Sweezy sought to trace. For example, for their purpose it was perfectly proper to include in the economic surplus the enormous and apparently irreducible military establishment maintained by capital at great social expense. This is of course one of the chief ways in which the abundance created by modern production is absorbed, drained off, wasted, beneficially for capital though with great injury to society. But insofar as this military establishment involves the bolstering up of demand for the products of manufacturing industry, the labor so utilized is already accounted for in the manufacturing sector of the economy. The fact that labor is used in the making of useless or harmful products does not for the moment concern us. It is the surplus of labor that has been drawn into new forms of production or of nonproduction that concerns us, since it is in this way that the occupational structure and thus the working class have been transformed.
176
Labor and Monopoly Capital
Surplus Value and Surplus Labor
177
\* Marx here uses the word Menschenmassen, which in this context would more properly translate as “human masses” or “masses of people." Since the masses dragooned for the new branches of capitalist industry are now more often women than men, it is all the more necessary to call attention to the male linguistic bias which in this case, as in others, has affected the translation of Marx.