It must be pointed out, finally, that Marx himself never drew a sharp distinction, in terms of the class structure of society, between productive and unproductive workers in the employ of the capitalist functioning as capitalist. He called production workers and commercial employees alike wage-workers.\* “In one respect," he said, “such a commercial employee is a wage-worker like any other. In the first place, his labour-power is bought with the variable capital of the merchant, not with money expended as revenue, and consequently it is not bought for private service, but for the purpose of expanding the value of the capital advanced for it. In the second place, the value of his labour-power, and thus his wages, are determined as those of other wage-workers, i.e., by the cost of production and reproduction of his specific labour-power, not by the product of his labour." And to this he adds: "Just as the labourer's unpaid labour directly creates surplus-value for productive capital, so the unpaid labour of the commercial wage-worker secures a share of this surplus-value for merchant's capital."s
Marx was not, however, completely convinced by his own argumentation, since he went on to point out that this “seems to conflict with the nature of merchant's capital, since this kind of capital does not act as capital by setting in motion the labour of others, as industrial capital does, but rather by doing its own work, i.e., performing the functions of buying and selling, this being precisely the means and the reason why it receives a portion of the surplusvalue produced by the industrial capital." Here his question is essentially: If commercial capital receives its return out of the surplus created by industrial capital, for the function purely of buying and selling, what happens when commercial capital grows so large, as it necessarily must, that it has to employ its own wage-workers, and thus convert a portion of its own capital into variable capital? Since such variable capital, as Marx points out, creates no value, it can grow only as a result of the growth of surplus value, never as a cause. But if that is the case, the portion of commercial capital converted into variable capital (i.e., into wage labor) is different from all other variable capital that creates value and surplus value. This difference between the capital laid out as wages for production workers and for commercial workers, Marx refers to as a “difficulty."He does not completely provide a solution, as is indicated by the facts that, first, he reminds himself parenthetically in the text to deal with the analysis of various points, including merchant's variable capital, "the law of necessary labour in the sphere of circulation," and other points including “money-dealing"capital; and second, his discussion of commercial wage labor breaks off and is followed by two blank pages, indicating, as Engels points out, that this matter was to have been treated at greater length. But in terms of what interests us here, Marx's discussion is substantially complete, and contains the following conclusions dealing with commercial labor:
- Mercantile capital must be analyzed first as a branch of industrial capital, and therefore within the office of the industrial capitalist rather than as a separate capital.
- Such an office is “from the outset infinitesimally small compared to the industrial workshop." But as the scale of production grows, the commercial office grows too, which “necessitates the employment of commercial wageworkers who make up the actual office staff."
- This is true also for separate merchant capital (and by inference for financial capital in banking, insurance, etc.), since “if every merchant had only as much capital as he himself were able to turn over by his own labour, there would be an infinite fragmentation of merchant's capital," which is not to be expected for reasons he explains. Thus in the commercial offices of merchant as well as banking capital the employment of commercial wage-workers may be expected to grow.
- The commercial worker is like the production worker in basic respects, that is, in the worker's sale and the capitalist's purchase of labor power. Yet commercial workers are unlike wage-workers in two special respects. First, since their employment is not a cause of the increase of surplus value, but a result, profit is a precondition of outlays on their wages rather than a consequence of outlays to hire them. (As an expression of this, Marx points out, a part of commercial salaries was “frequently paid by a share in the profit.") And second, since the concrete form of their labors is generally different from that of production workers, commercial workers “belong to the better-paid class of wage-workers—to those whose labour is classed as skilled and stands above average labour."
- But, since Marx would have been the last to regard the determinate forms of labor of any sort as fixed and final under capitalism, he immediately adds to this that commercial wages “tend to fall," partly because of the “division oflabour in the office," and partly because the “universality of public education" devalues the labor power of commercial workers with the progress of capitalist production.
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Labor and Monopoly Capital
Productive and Unproductive Labor
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\* He did not, however, call them the “commercial proletariat"; Gough is mistaken in this, since the term occurs in a footnote added and signed by Engels.3 The fact that Marx did not use this term, but that Engels found it possible to use it some two decades later, is itself significant, and the significance is made partly clear by Engels himself in the same footnote, in which he points out that clerks trained in commercial operations and acquainted with three or four languages “offer their services in vain in London City at 25 shillings per week, which is far below the wages of a good machinist."4