{"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":"250 / 251","pdf_page":138,"physical_index":138,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"96d4d83600f8df09813327a4a21d2c3a7b544f9b32017d0a52a012c82d9c29bd"},"chapter":"Acknowledgments","content":"These are only some of the many difficulties that arise from the attempts to draw strict classifications of the labor in capitalist society on the basis of its determinate form—the particular operations it pursues. They merely illustrate the principle that for capitalism, what is important is not the determinate form of labor but its social form, its capacity to produce, as wage labor, a profit for the capitalist. The capitalist is indifferent to the particular form of labor; he does not care, in the last analysis, whether he hires workers to produce automobiles, wash them, repair them, repaint them, fill them with gasoline and oil, rent them by the day, drive them for hire, park them, or convert them into scrap metal. His concern is the difference between the price he pays for an aggregate of labor and other commodities, and the price he receives for the commodities——whether goods or“services\"—produced or rendered.\n\nFrom this point of view, the distinction between commodities in the form of goods and commodities in the form of services is important only to the economist or statistician, not to the capitalist. What counts for him is not the determinate form of the labor, but whether it has been drawn into the network of capitalist social relations, whether the worker who carries it on has been transformed into a wage-worker, and whether the labor of the worker has been transformed into productive labor—that is, labor which produces a profit for capital. Beds were made, floors were scrubbed, food prepared and served, children minded, the sick tended long before people were hired to do any of these things. And even after the hiring of servants to do them had begun, these activities were of no interest to the capitalist except in terms of his comfort and household expenses. They became of interest to him as a capitalist when he began to hire people to do services as a profitable activity, a part of his business, a form of the capitalist mode of production. And this began on a large scale only with the era of monopoly capitalism which created the universal marketplace and transformed into a commodity every form of the activity of humankind including what had heretofore been the many things that people did for themselves or for each other. With this began the changed attitude of the capitalist toward service labor, a change which can be seen both in his own massive ventures into the field and, on the ideological side, in the change in the view of service labor taken by economists.\n\nThus, service occupations have formed a large share in the social division of labor throughout the capitalist era—not to speak of earlier times—but they have not formed a “productive” or profitable part until recently. The multitude of personal servants was, in the early period of capitalism, both a heritage of feudal and semi-feudal relations in the form of a vast employment furnished by the landowning aristocracy, and a reflection of the riches created by the Industrial Revolution in the form of similar employment furnished by capitalists and the upper middle class. In the United States in 1820, according to the first occupational census, employment in domestic and personal services was three-fourths as great as the combined employment of the manufacturing, mining, fishing, and lumbering industries; even in 1870 such employment was not much less than half as great as these nonagricultural employments.ª (A statistician who calculated the amount of domestic and personal service employment as a percent of the population between 1820 and 1920 found it remarkably stable, in the range between 4.5 and 6 percent.)³ In England, according to the census of 1861, more than 1.2 million people were employed as servants, and this does not include male or female servants on farms. This, as Marx pointed out, was greater than the total employment in the textile and metal-working industries.\\*\n\nBut from the capitalist point of view, such employment was not an addition to national wealth or income, but a deduction from it. This view, as set forth by classical political economy and especially in Adam Smith, had nothing to do with the nature of the duties performed by these workers (although this point was sometimes confused) but arose rather from the fact that these duties were not performed under the auspices of capital qua capital. It was not when he was accumulating capital that the capitalist employed service labor, but when he was spending his profits. \"Thus,\" said Adam Smith, \"the labour of a manufacturer adds, generally, to the value of the materials which he works upon, that of his own maintenance and of his master's profit. The labour of a menial servant, on the contrary, adds to the value of nothing. . . . A man grows rich by employing a multitude of manufacturers: he grows poor, by maintaining a multitude of menial servants.\" And so zealous was Adam Smith in his pursuit of this point that he turned it against all “service\" labor in general and found the fault to be not in the fact that the master was so foolish as to employ servants instead of investing in more workers, but rather in the fact that “service\" labor did not congeal into a tangible commodity. The clarification of this error on Smith's part occupies many pages ofMarx's Theories of Surplus Value. Smith's modern editor, Edwin Cannan, more familiar with the profitable uses to which service labor can be put, corrected him by pointing out that “this is only true when the manufacturers are employed to produce commodities for sale and when the menial servants are employed merely for the comfort of the employer. A man may and often does grow poor by employing people to make particular subjects or vendible commodities' for his own consumption, and an innkeeper may and often does grow rich by employing menial servants.\"8\n\n250\n\nLabor and Monopoly Capital\n\nService Occupations and Retail Trade\n\n251\n\n\\* This is cited by Marx, significantly, in the section of Capital called \"The Theory of Compensation as Regards the Workpeople Displaced by Machinery.\"6 In his Theories of Surplus Value, this thought is rendered more fully: “According to the latest report (1861 or 1862), on the factories, the total number of persons (managers included) employed in the factories properly so called of the United Kingdom was only 775,534, while the number of female servants in England alone amounted to 1 million. What a convenient arrangement it is that makes a factory girl to sweat twelve hours in a factory, so that the factory proprietor, with a part of her unpaid labour, can take into his personal service her sister as maid, her brother as groom and her cousin as soldier or policeman!\"7","previous_page":137,"next_page":139}