{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","id":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","uuid":"bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title":"Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century","normalized_title":"laborandmonopolycapitalthedegradationofworkinthetwentiethcentury","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"0853459401","isbns":["0853459401"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":183,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Labor%20and%20Monopoly%20Capital%20The%20Degradation%20of%20Work%20in%20the%20Twentieth%20Century","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/bde76793-4c65-415a-a237-6ccacc2e0802/search"},"page":{"printed_page":"208 / 209","pdf_page":117,"physical_index":117,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"769ef73f2304cc8513f192eb75baf16d51b831c7e1c2cc21c846e3d8839cb1ce"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"In the pure clerical industries, this tendency is carried much further. Banks and credit agencies conduct only one mode of labor, the clerical, and below the managerial level the labor employed consists almost entirely of clerks who work in offices and service workers who clean the offices. The only thing that prevents this from being the case with brokerage and investment houses and insurance companies is the need for a large number of salespeople. To a lesser degree, the same heavily clerical character of the labor process is true of law offices and the offices of other institutionalized professions, advertising agencies, the publishers of books and periodicals insofar as they do not themselves do the work of manufacture, philanthropic and religious organizations, correspondence schools, agencies for travel, employment, etc., and government offices for public administration.\n\nIn all these industries, the development of capital has transformed the operating function of the capitalist from a personal activity into the work of a mass of people. The function of the capitalist is to represent capital and to enlarge it. This is done either by controlling the production of surplus value in the productive industries and activities, or by appropriating it from outside those industries and activities. The industrial capitalist, the manufacturer, is an example of the first; the banker of the second.\\* These management functions of control and appropriation have in themselves become labor processes. They are conducted by capital in the same way that it carries on the labor processes of production: with wage labor purchased on a large scale in a labor market and organized into huge “production” machines according to the same principles that govern the organization of factory labor. Here the productive processes of society disappear into a stream of papera stream of paper, moreover, which is processed in a continuous flow like that of the cannery, the meatpacking line, the car assembly conveyor, by workers organized in much the same way.\n\nThis ghostly form of the production process assumes an ever greater importance in capitalist society, not only because of the requirements of the new way in which production is organized, and not only because ofthe growing need for coordination and control, but for another and more significant reason as well. In the social forms of capitalism all products of labor carry, apart from their physical characteristics, the invisible marks of ownership. Apart from their physical form, there is their social form as value. From the point of view of capital, the representation of value is more important than the physical form or useful properties of the labor product. The particular kind of commodity being sold means little; the net gain is everything. A portion of the labor of society must therefore be devoted to the accounting of value. As capitalism becomes more complex and develops into its monopoly stage, the accounting of value becomes infinitely more complex. The number of intermediaries between production and consumption increases, so that the value accounting of the single commodity is duplicated through a number of stages. The battle to realize values, to turn them into cash, calls for a special accounting of its own. Just as in some industries the labor expended upon marketing begins to approach the amount expended upon the production of the commodities being sold, so in some industries the labor expended upon the mere transformation of the form of value (from the commodity form into the form of money or credit)—including the policing, the cashiers and collection work, the recordkeeping, the accounting, etc.——begins to approach or surpass the labor used in producing the underlying commodity or service. And finally, as we have already noted, entire “industries\" come into existence whose activity is concerned with nothing but the transfer of values and the accounting entailed by this.\n\nSince the work of recording the movement of values is generally accomplished by a capitalist agency for its particular ends, its own accounting has no standing with other organizations. This leads to an immense amount of duplication. The normal presumption in intercorporate dealings is not one of honesty but of dishonesty; unverified records are not considered adequate or trustworthy for any purposes but those of the institution which keeps them. Thus each pair of corporations, in their dealings with each other in the transactions ofpurchase and sale, credit and payment, etc., maintain a complete set of records, each the mirror image of those kept by the other. That which appears on the books of one as a credit shows in the books of the other as a debit. Since, when disputes arise, the burden of proof is shuffled back and forth between the parties in accordance with the available documentation, each set of records is as a rule a private affair to be used not for helpful coordination but as a weapon.\n\nThe internal recordkeeping of each corporate institution is, moreover, constructed in a way which assumes the possible dishonesty, disloyalty, or laxity of every human agency which it employs; this, in fact, is the first principle of modern accounting. It is for this reason, among others, that double-entry bookkeeping proved so suitable to capitalist accounting. Under this system, every transaction is recorded at birth in two places, and the entire movement of the values that pass through the enterprise is reflected in an interlocking set of accounts which check and verify each other. The falsification of only one single account will usually lead directly to the falsifier, and as a rule the work of falsifying many accounts so that they continue in balance with each other is possible only through the collaboration of a number of people. This system of dovetailing accounts is supplemented by a variety of independent checks and controls. In total, a modern financial system, although not impervious to falsification or error, is a well-guarded structure a large part of which exists for purposes of self-security, and as a rule such falsifications as are found in it appear not by accident but by the policy of the management.\n\n208\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nClerical Workers\n\n209\n\n\\* The fact that banking corporations produce nothing, but merely profit from the mass of capital in money form at their disposal through activities which once went by the name “usury,\" no longer subjects them to discredit in monopoly capitalist society as it once did in feudal and in early capitalist society. In fact, financial institutions are accorded a place at the pinnacle of the social division of labor. This is because they have mastered the art of expanding capital without the necessity of passing it through any production process whatsoever. (The magical appearance of the feat merely conceals the fact that such corporations are appropriating a share in the values produced elsewhere.) The cleanliness and economy of the procedure, its absolute purity as a form of the accumulation of capital, now elicit nothing but admiration from those who are still tied to production.","previous_page":116,"next_page":118}