Labor and Monopoly Capital The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century

The growth of such institutions calls forth a very large “service" employment, which is further swelled by the reorganization of hospitality on a market basis in the form of motels, hotels, restaurants, etc. The growth not only of such institutions but of immense amounts of floor space devoted to wholesaling and retailing, offices, and also multiple-dwelling units, brings into being a huge specialized personnel whose function is nothing but cleaning, again made up in good part of women who, in accord with the precepts of the division of labor, perform one of the functions they formerly exercised in the home, but now in the service of capital which profits from each day's labor.

In the period of monopoly capitalism, the first step in the creation of the universal market is the conquest of all goods production by the commodity form, the second step is the conquest of an increasing range of services and their conversion into commodities, and the third step is a“product cycle"which invents new products and services, some of which become indispensable as the conditions of modern life change to destroy alternatives. In this way the inhabitant of capitalist society is enmeshed in a web made up of commodity goods and commodity services from which there is little possibility of escape except through partial or total abstention from social life as it now exists. This is reinforced from the other side by a development which is analogous to that which proceeds in the worker's work: the atrophy of competence. In the end, the population finds itself willy-nilly in the position of being able to do little or nothing itself as easily as it can be hired, done in the marketplace, by one of the multifarious new branches of social labor. And while from the point of view of consumption this means total dependence on the market, from the point of view of labor it means that all work is carried on under the aegis of capital and is subject to its tribute of profit to expand capital still further.

The universal market is widely celebrated as a bountiful “service economy," and praised for its “convenience,"“cultural opportunities," “modern facilities for care of the handicapped," etc. We need not emphasize how badly this urban civilization works and how much misery it embraces. For purposes of our discussion, it is the other side of the universal market, its dehumanizing aspects, its confinement of a large portion of the population to degraded labor, that is chiefly of interest. Just as in the factory it is not the machines that are at fault but the conditions of the capitalist mode of production under which they are used, so here it is not the necessary provision of social services that is at fault, but the effects of an all-powerful marketplace which, governed by capital and its profitable investment, is both chaotic and profoundly hostile to all feelings of community. Thus the very social services which should facilitate social life and social solidarity have the opposite effect. As the advances of modern household and service industries lighten the family labor, they increase the futility of family life; as they remove the burdens of personal relations, they strip away its affections; as they create an intricate social life, they rob it of every vestige of community and leave in its place the cash nexus.

It is characteristic of most of the jobs created in this “service sector" that, by the nature of the labor processes they incorporate, they are less susceptible to technological change than the processes of most goods-producing industries. Thus while labor tends to stagnate or shrink in the manufacturing sector, it piles up in these services and meets a renewal of the traditional forms of pre-monopoly competition among the many firms that proliferate in fields with lower capital-entry requirements. Largely nonunion and drawing on the pool of pauperized labor at the bottom of the working-class population, these industries create new low-wage sectors of the working class, more intensely exploited and oppressed than those in the mechanized fields of production.

This is the field of employment, along with clerical work, into which women in large numbers are drawn out of the household. According to the statistical conventions of economics, the conversion of much household labor into labor in factories, offices, hospitals, canneries, laundries, clothing shops, retail stores, restaurants, and so forth, represents a vast enlargement of the national product. The goods and services produced by unpaid labor in the home are not reckoned at all, but when the same goods and services are produced by paid labor outside the home they are counted. From a capitalist point of view, which is the only viewpoint recognized for national accounting purposes, such

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reckoning makes sense. The work of the housewife, though it has the same material or service effect as that of the chambermaid, restaurant worker, cleaner, porter, or laundry worker, is outside the purview of capital; but when she takes one of these jobs outside the home she becomes a productive worker. Her labor now enriches capital and thus deserves a place in the national product. This is the logic of the universal market. Its effect upon the patterns of employment and the composition of the working class will later be treated in greater detail.

Notes

Chapter 14

The Role of the State

The use of the power of the state to foster the development of capitalism is not a new phenomenon peculiar to the monopoly stage of the past hundred years. The governments of capitalist countries have played this role from the beginnings of capitalism. In the most elementary sense, the state is guarantor of the conditions, the social relations, of capitalism, and the protector of the ever more unequal distribution of property which this system brings about. But in a further sense state power has everywhere been used by governments to enrich the capitalist class, and by groups or individuals to enrich themselves. The powers of the state having to do with taxation, the regulation of foreign trade, public lands, commerce and transportation, the maintenance of armed forces, and the discharge of the functions of public administration have served as an engine to siphon wealth into the hands of special groups, by both legal and illegal means.

But with monopoly capitalism this role is greatly expanded and takes on a more complex and sophisticated form. In some countries, particularly Germany and Japan, monopoly capitalism both created and was created by a new state power; thus the modern role of the state appears in these countries from the very beginning of the epoch. In other countries, principally the United States and Britain, the capitalist class had marked off for the government a more circumscribed sphere of operations, and for this and other reasons the growth of social and economic interventionism on the part of the state assumed, for a time, the peculiar shape of a movement for reform and appeared to develop as a struggle against capital, although this proved illusory. At any rate, in the end and in all places the maturing of the various tendencies of monopoly capitalism created a situation in which the expansion of direct state activities in the economy could not be avoided. This can be clearly seen if we consider some of the reasons for this development under four general headings:

1. Monopoly capitalism tends to generate a greater economic surplus than it can absorb. As a result it becomes increasingly vulnerable to disorders in its overall functioning, in the forms of stagnation and/or severe depression, marked by unemployment and idle plant capacity.\* With the diagnosis pointing to a shortage in “effective demand," it has finally been accepted by the policy-makers of capitalist societies that government spending will, to the extent that it is enlarged, fill this gap—the effect of an increase in government spending being merely proportional if taxes are increased a like amount, but greater than proportional if spending outruns tax revenues.' But this policy, which has in one form or another been adopted by all capitalist countries, did not become universally accepted doctrine until a half-century after the beginnings of monopoly capitalism, and then only because of the prolonged depression of the 1930s, a crisis which found no spontaneous resolution and which threatened the existence of capitalism on a world scale.

\* It is far beyond our scope to try to deal with this subject here. I recommend to the reader the excellent exposition in Baran and Sweezy, Monopoly Capital. While the entire work is devoted to the generation and absorption of the surplus, see especially Chapters 3 and 8.

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1. The internationalization of capitalwith respect to markets, materials, and investments—rapidly created a situation of economic competition which brought in its wake military clashes among capitalist countries. At the same time the spread of revolutionary movements in the countries dominated by foreign capital gave to all capitalist countries an interest in policing the world structure of imperialism. In this situation, the traditional concept of a peacetime military establishment supplemented by war mobilization in time of need eventually gave way, because of the unremitting crisis nature of military needs, to a permanent war mobilization as the ordinary posture. This meshed with the need for a government guarantee of“effective demand," and provided a form of absorption of the economic surplus acceptable to the capitalist class.\* Like other aspects of monopoly capitalism, this one too was pioneered by Germany (during the Nazi era in the 1930s) and has been practiced on a grand scale by the United States since World War II.

1. Within capitalist nations, poverty and insecurity have become more or less permanent features of social life, and have grown beyond the ability of private philanthropies to cope with them. Since these and other sources of discontent are concentrated in great cities and, if allowed to persist without amelioration, threaten the very existence of the social structure, the government intervenes to sustain life and relieve insecurity. Characteristically, the disputes within the capitalist class over this issue, including disagreements over the scale, scope, and auspices of the welfare measures to be adopted, offer an arena for political agitation which engages the working population as well, and offers a substitute for the revolutionary movements which would soon gain ground if the rulers followed a more traditional laissez-faire course.

1. With the rapid urbanization of society, and the acceleration of the pace of economic and social life, the need for other government-provided services has increased and the number and variety of these has thereby multiplied. Foremost among these services is education, which has assumed a much enlarged role in the era of monopoly capitalism. The place of educational services in catering to the occupational needs of capitalist society will be treated in a later section of this book, but here we must mention another important function of the educational structure: with the disappearance of farm and small-town life as the major arenas of child-rearing, the responsibility for the care and socialization of children has become increasingly institutionalized. The minimum requirements for “functioning" in a modern urban environment—both as workers and as consumers—are imparted to children in an institutional setting rather than in the family or the community. At the same time, what the child must learn is no longer adaptation to the slow round of seasonal labor in an immediately natural environment, but rather adaptation to a speedy and intricate social machinery which is not adjusted to social humanity in general, let alone to the individual, but dictates the rounds of production, consumption, survival, and amusement. Whatever the formal educational content of the curriculum, it is in this respect not so much what the child learns that is important as what he or she becomes wise to. In school, the child and the adolescent practice what they will later be called upon to do as adults: the conformity to routines, the manner in which they will be expected to snatch from the fast-moving machinery their needs and wants.\*

The school system which provides this as well as other forms of training is only one of the services which are necessarily expanded in the industrialization and urbanization of society and in the specifically capitalist form taken by these transformations. Public health, postal, and many other government functions are similarly expanded by the needs of an intricate and delicately balanced social structure which has no means of social coordination or planning other than the internal corporate planning of the monopolies that provide the skeletal structure of the economy. And many of these “services," such as prisons, police, and “social work," expand extraordinarily because of the embittered and antagonistic social life of the cities.

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\* This is a way oflife that has seldom been expressed more exactly than by Veblen: “. . . the consumer,' as the denizens of these machine-made communities are called, is required to conform to this network of standardisations in his demand and uses of them. . . . To take effectual advantage of what is offered as the wheels of routine go round, in the way of work and play, livelihood and recreation, he must know by facile habituation what is going on and how and in what quantities and at what price and where and when, and for the best effect he must adapt his movements with skilled exactitude and a cool mechanical insight to the nicely balanced moving equilibrium of the mechanical processes engaged. To live—not to say at ease—under the exigencies of this machinemade routine requires a measure of consistent training in the mechanical apprehension of things. The mere mechanics of conformity to the schedule of living implies a degree of trained insight and facile strategy in all manner of quantitative adjustments and adaptations, particularly at the larger centres of population, where the routine is more comprehensive and elaborate."3

\* Business Week once explained this as follows: “There's a tremendous social and economic difference between welfare pump priming and military pump priming. . . . Military spending doesn't really alter the structure of the economy. It goes through the regular channels. As far as a business man is concerned, a munitions order from the government is much like an order from a private customer." Spending for public works and public welfare, on the other hand, “makes new channels of its own. It creates new institutions. It redistributes income. It shifts demand from one industry to another. It changes the whole economic pattern. . . ."2

The growth of government spending, relatively slow in the first half-century of monopoly capitalism, becomes extremely rapid thereafter. The following tabulation made by Baran and Sweezy illustrates this, in terms both of spending figures and the percentage of Gross National Product passing through government in the United States.

It must not be supposed, however, that the impact of government spending upon the occupational structure is proportional to these figures. Much of government spending is channeled through the existing structure of the market rather than through direct government employment: it takes the form of military orders, the letting of contracts for highway and building construction, transfer payments to individuals and businesses, etc. Thus in 1961, when the federal, state, and local governments were spending almost 29 percent of the Gross National Product, the combined civilian employment of all three types of government was 13 percent of total civilian employment. But even this percentage is large, and it has been growing. In federal employment, it is concentrated heavily in the civilian establishment for administering the military; in state and local governments, it is concentrated in education.

Notes

Part IV

The Growing Working-Class Occupations

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Chapter 15

Clerical Workers

If we view the evolution of those occupations called“clerical" over a long time span, from the Industrial Revolution to the present, we are soon led to doubt that we are dealing with the continuous evolution of a single stratum. The clerical employees of the early nineteenth-century enterprise may, on the whole, more properly appear as the ancestors of modern professional management than of the present classification of clerical workers. While it is probable that some of the clerks of that time corresponded roughly to the modern clerical worker in function and status, it is for various reasons more accurate to see the clerical workers of the present monopoly capitalist era as virtually a new stratum, created in the last decades of the nineteenth century and tremendously enlarged since then. It is very important that this be understood, because if it is not, and if one ascribes to the millions of present-day clerical workers the “middle class" or semi-managerial functions of that tiny and long-vanished clerical stratum of early capitalism, the result can only be a drastic misconception of modern society. Yet this is exactly the practice of academic sociology and popular journalism.

The place of the handful of clerks in the early industrial enterprise—and there were generally fewer than a half-dozen in even the largest firmswas semi-managerial in terms of the present distribution of functions. Lockwood says of the mid-nineteenth century in his book on British clerical labor that “many of the clerks mentioned at the earlier period were probably performing duties which would nowadays be classified as managerial.'"1 And, in fact, in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, "clerk" or “chief clerk" was the title of the manager in some British industries, railways, and public services. It was not uncommon for clerks to be paid by the manager out of his own salary, thus attesting to their position as assistant managers or at least assistants to the manager, and some would be favored with annuities upon the closing of a works or inheritances upon the death of the owner (Matthew Boulton, the pioneer machine builder, included such a provision in his will). Managers and owners filled clerical posts with their relatives, since clerks often rose into managerships or partnerships.² Klingender, writing of the period 1840 to 1860 in Britain, says: “As long as the requirements of banking, commerce, or industry did not exceed the resources of family concerns or small partnerships, there could not be an extensive development of clerical labour. In this early stage there was an almost feudal relationship between the small number of clerks to be found in such offices and their employers. The clerk was more a family servant than a wage labourer." Lewis Corey, writing about the United States, says: “The clerk was an honored employee 150 years ago, and still more so in earlier times. His position was a confidential one, the employer discussed affairs with him and relied on his judgment; he might, and often did, become a partner and marry the employer's daughter. The clerk was measurably a professional and undeniably a member of the middle class."4

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This picture of the clerk as assistant manager, retainer, confidant, management trainee, and prospective son-in-law can of course be overdrawn. There were clerks—hard-driven copyists in law offices, for example—whose condition and prospects in life were little better than those of dock workers. But by and large, in terms of function, authority, pay, tenure of employment (a clerical position was usually a lifetime post), prospects, not to mention status and even dress, the clerks stood much closer to the employer than to factory labor.

This is underlined by the tiny size of the nineteenth-century clerical groups, The census of 1870 in the United States classified only 82,000or six-tenths of 1 percent of all "gainful workers"—in clerical occupations.\* In Great Britain, the census of 1851 counted some 70,000 to 80,000 clerks, or eight-tenths of 1 percent of the gainfully occupied. By the turn of the century the proportion of clerks in the working population had risen to 4 percent in Great Britain and 3 percent in the United States; in the intervening decades, the clerical working class had begun to be born. By the census of 1961, there were in Britain about 3 million clerks, almost 13 percent of the occupied population; and in the United States in 1970, the clerical classification had risen to more than 14 million workers, almost 18 perċent of the gainfully occupied, making this equal in size, among the gross classifications of the occupational scale, to that of operatives of all sorts.

It must be emphasized, for the sake of avoiding confusion with the common but absolutely meaningless term "white-collar worker," that the clerical classification to which these figures refer and which is discussed in this section includes only such occupations as bookkeeper (generally speaking the highest occupation in this group), secretary, stenographer, cashier, bank teller, file clerk, telephone operator, office machine operator, payroll and timekeeping clerk, postal clerk, receptionist, stock clerk, typist, and the like and it includes these clerical workers no matter where they are employed, in private or in government offices, in manufacturing, trade, banking, insurance, etc.

The creation of a new class of workers, having little continuity with the small and privileged clerical stratum of the past, is emphasized by fundamental changes in two other respects: composition by sex, and relative pay.

The British census of 1851 counted 19 women under the heading of “commercial clerks," and altogether it is estimated that no more than one-tenth of 1 percent of clerks were womenin other words, fewer than 100 of all clerks in the British Isles. In the United States as late as 1900, the clerical classification of under 900,000 persons was still more than three-quarters male. By the censuses of 1961 in Great Britain and 1960 in the United States, the percentage of women had risen in both countries to about two-thirds. And within only another decade in the United States, three-fourths were women: this represented an increase from a little over 200,000 female clerical workers in 1900 to more than 10 million only seventy years later! Male clerical workers, a rapidly declining proportion, are increasingly confined to occupations such as postal clerks and mail carriers, stock clerks and storekeepers, and shipping and receiving clerks.

If we consider the pay scales for clerical labor as compared with the pay of production labor, the change is just as emphatic. According to Lockwood, the lower grades of British clerks in the period 1850 to 1880 were in the per annum range of £75 to £150. Only some 10 to 15 percent of the working class of the time was in that same range, the portion which Lockwood calls a “highly select superaristocracy." We may conclude from this that the pay of clerks began at about the point where the pay of production and transportation workers left off. In the United States, in 1900, clerical employees of steam railroads and in manufacturing establishments had average annual earnings of \$1,011; in the same year, the average annual earnings of workers in these industries was \$435 for manufacturing and \$548 for steam railroads.' And there are other indications that the average pay of the clerical classification was about double the production and transportation workers’ average; in 1899, for example, the average pay of all full-time postal employees was \$955.8

The extent of the change in relative pay scales that has taken place since that time is made clear in a Special Labor Force Report on weekly earnings of full-time workers in the United States, which groups workers by occupation and which was based upon data gathered by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in May 1971.9 According to this report, the median usual weekly wage for full-time clerical work was lower than that in every type of so-called blue-collar work. In fact, it was lower than the median in all urban occupational classifications except service employment:

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\* Occupational statistics more than a half-century old must be viewed with skepticism, since the methods of counting and of classification, apart from their crudity, were often not comparable to those used at present. They must be taken as estimates rather than precise statistics (even modern statistics fall far short of precision, especially when they involve counts and classifications of the low-wage strata). In the present discussion they are used as indicators of relative orders of magnitude, and they are adequate for that purpose.

Nor does the fact that these medians are a form of averaging distort the picture of relative pay. In fact, the earnings distribution simply bears out the impression conveyed by the medians:

From this tabulation it is clear how similar the pay scales and distributions are in the clerical and operative categories, the differences between the two—both in overall medians and in distribution—favoring the operatives.\*

Clerical work in its earlier stages has been likened to a craft.² The similarities are indeed apparent. Although the tools of the craft consisted only of pen, ink, other desk appurtenances, and writing paper, envelopes, and ledgers, it represented a total occupation, the object of which was to keep current the records ofthe financial and operating condition of the enterprise, as well as its relations with the external world. Master craftsmen, such as bookkeepers or chief clerks, maintained control over the process in its totality, and apprentices or journeymen craftsmen—ordinary clerks, copying clerks, office boys——learned their crafts in office apprenticeships, and in the ordinary course of events advanced through the levels by promotion. The work involved, in addition to ordinary bookkeeping on the double-entry or Italian model (to which was added the rudiments of cost as well as profit-and-loss accounting at the beginning of the nineteenth century), such tasks as timekeeping and payroll, quality control, commercial traveling, drafting, copying duplicates by hand, preparing accounts in several copies, etc.

In its most general aspects, office work entails accounting and recordkeeping, planning and scheduling, correspondence and interviewing, filing and copying, and the like. But with the development of the modern corporation these functions assume the particular forms of the various departments and branches of the enterprise.

The factory office, which began with its first and original functionary, the timekeeper, usually added as its second functionary a foreman's clerk, whose task was to assist the foreman by keeping track of the work in process and its stages of completion. These clerks had as their responsibility the records of workers, materials, and tasks. Out of these rudimentary functions grew the modern cost, planning and scheduling, purchasing, and engineering and design sections.

Sales, previously handled chiefly by the owner himself, perhaps assisted by a clerk who doubled as traveler, became the function of a marketing division, subdivided into sections to handle sales traveling, correspondence with customers, salesmen, and manufacturers, order processing, commissions, sales analyses, advertising, promotion, and publicity. A separate financial office takes care of financial statements, borrowing, extending credit, ensuring collections, assessing and regulating cash flow, etc. And so on for other office divisions, among which the most important is an administration office where corporate policy is made and enforced upon all divisions.

The offices so described are those of a producing corporation, in which commodities in the form of goods or services are made and sold; these offices are thus subsidiary and complementary to the productive labor processes carried on elsewhere within the same corporation. But with the development of monopoly capitalism came the extraordinary enlargement of those types of enterprises which, entirely separated from the process of production, carry on their activities either chiefly or entirely through clerical labor.

Commercial concerns which deal only with the purchase and resale of commodities generally require three types oflabor in large masses: distributive (for warehousing, packing, shipping), sales, and clerical. This is particularly true on the wholesale level, in which the clerks are the largest category of. workers, outnumbering even sales workers. But even in retail trade, some kinds of enterprises, such as general merchandising and mail order houses, show a very large percentage of clerical labor.

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\* In Great Britain the trend has been similar. Writing in 1958 and basing himself upon data up to 1956, Lockwood says: “. . . the gross change in income relativities is unmistakable. The main result of this change is that the average clerk is now very roughly on the same income level as the average manual worker, or perhaps even slightly below."10 And the same conclusion was reached by David M. Gordon on the basis of 1959 data for the United States: “The full distributions of clerical and sales jobs and blue-collar manual jobs were almost exactly comparable," so far as earnings are concerned." But within only a decade, the rapidly worsening relative pay position of clerical workers brought them, on the average, below all forms of so-called blue-collar jobs.

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.

In 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.

This 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.

Since 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.

The 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.

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\* 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.

Nor is this all. Since corporations must exhibit financial statements to the outside world for the purpose of raising capital, and since various other needs for such public disclosure exist—such as bank credit, settlement of accounts with outside parties as required under contracts with them, etc.—still another means of establishing the truth of records is provided. This is the independent audit by an accounting firm which makes it a "profession" to investigate records either when called upon or on a continuing basis, and to “certify" their results. The dishonesty presumed of all corporations is offset by the special function of such auditors, who are supposed to make a profession of honesty, although this is not usually the case either. At any rate, this brings into existence still another set of records and another species of duplicatory clerical work. And to this may be added much of the work of government regulatory and tax offices which deal with the same material from still other standpoints.

Thus the value-form of commodities separates itself out from the physical form as a vast paper empire which under capitalism becomes as real as the physical world, and which swallows ever increasing amounts of labor. This is the world in which value is kept track of, and in which surplus value is transferred, struggled over, and allocated. A society which is based upon the value-form surrenders more and more ofits working population to the complex ramifications of the claims to ownership of value. Although there is no way of calculating it or testing the proposition, it is likely that the greatest part of the rapid increase of clerical labor is due to this; certainly there is no doubt that the demands of marketing, together with the demands of value accounting, consume the bulk of clerical time.

With the rapid growth of offices in the last decades of the nineteenth century, and the change of office work from something merely incidental to management into a labor process in its own right, the need to systematize and control it began to be felt. When this work was carried on in offices which contained only a few desks separated by a railing from the proprietor, it was, in effect, self-supervising, and required only the usual prudent safeguards against embezzlement, etc. In industrial enterprises, clerical expenses were small and incidental to production expenses. In commercial and financial offices, these expenses were also small and incidental before the era of mass merchandising, “consumer" banking, and group insurance. None of these enterprises could yet feel that its success was significantly dependent upon the efficiency of the clerical labor process.

As this situation changed, the intimate associations, the atmosphere of mutual obligation, and the degree of loyalty which characterized the small office became transformed from a prime desideratum into a positive liability, and management began to cut those ties and substitute the impersonal discipline of a so-called modern organization. To be sure, in doing so it was careful throughout this transitional period to retain as long as it could the feelings of obligation and loyalty it had traditionally fostered; but its own special commitments to its office staff were severed, one by one, as the office grew. The characteristic feature of this era was the ending of the reign of the bookkeeper and the rise of the office manager as the prime functionary and representative of higher management. Office managership, a product of the monopoly period of capitalism, developed as a specialized branch of management, with its own schools, professional associations, textbooks and manuals, periodicals, standards, and methods.

In the context of the times in which it took place, this naturally meant the application of scientific management methods to the office. By the first decades ofthe present century, the effort was well under way. In 1917, a volume entitled Scientific Office Management, and subtitled A report on the results of applications of the Taylor System of Scientific Management to offices, supplemented with a discussion of how to obtain the most important of these results, was published in New York, Chicago, and London. Its author, William Henry Leffingwell, had begun to use the Taylor system ten years earlier, and had accumulated considerable experience in offices like those of the Curtis Publishing Company. The following year Lee Galloway, for many years professor at New York University, published his standard work, Office Management: Its Principles and Practice. In these volumes, among others, the program of office management is clearly set forth: the purpose of the office is control over the enterprise, and the purpose of office management is control over the office. Thus Galloway:

The larger . . . business offices grow, the more difficult and important become the problems of management. Orders must be given to employees by the managers, and reports of work performed must be recorded. Inspectors, superintendents, foremen, senior clerks, and office managers increase in numbertheir function being to keep the employees and machines working harmoniously. At first one of these supervisors can give instructions verbally and keep the details in his memory, but as the subdivisions of work increase the necessity grows for continual communication between the various ranks of authority. Letters and memos, production orders and work tickets, speaking tubes and telautographs, cost statistics and controlling accounts, time clocks and messenger boys, multiply to keep pace with the growing complexity of 13 business and to save the time of executives and workmen alike.

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The emphasis in this passage is upon the increase in clerical work in the processes of production. But Galloway soon extends the idea to cover the total office function in the capitalist enterprise:

Execution implies control—control of the factory organization—control of the financial organization—control of the marketing organization. It is the work of the office organization, under the supervision of the office manager, to devise records, methods, and systems for carrying out the function of control and for co-ordinating the activities of one department with those of another.'4

With the growth of the control function, and with the consequent transformation of these functions of management into independent labor processes, comes the need to control the new labor processes, according to the same principles as those applied to the factory. Leffingwell thus says at the opening of his work:

Time and motion study reveal just as startling results in the ordinary details of clerical work as they do in the factory. And after all, since every motion of the hand or body, every thought, no matter how simple, involves the consumption of physical energy, why should not the study and analysis of these motions result in the discovery of a mass of useless effort in clerical work just as it does in the factory?15

These early practitioners of scientific management applied to the office the basic concepts of the Taylor system, beginning with the breakup of the arrangement under which each clerk did his or her own work according to traditional methods, independent judgment, and light general supervision, usually on the part of the bookkeeper. Work was henceforth to be carried on as prescribed by the office manager, and its methods and time durations were to be verified and controlled by management on the basis of its own studies of each job. Thus Leffingwell instances the installation of the Taylor system in the offices of the Curtis Publishing Company, which conducted a large mail order operation. The opening of mail was reorganized, with the result that five hundred pieces per hour were handled by one clerk, as against the previous one hundred; the same efforts were applied to the standardization of over five hundred other clerical operations.

Stenographic output and other forms of typing were studied most carefully. “Some typewriter concerns equip their machines with a mechanical contrivance which automatically counts the strokes made on the typewriter and records them on a dial." This meter was used in conjunction with a time clock, which the typist punched at the start and finish of each job. Metering of this kind was used as the basis for piecework payments (it took some time before management experts discovered that under such a regimen typists never used the tabulator key, always the space bar, in order to increase their count). Companies using typewriters without such advanced equipment made use of the square-inch method described in many textbooks down to the present day. A celluloid sheet ruled in square inches is placed over the typed page, and the number of characters within the area of type is shown at the end of the last line. "If the letter is double-spaced," Galloway adds with the meticulous scientific spirit that characterizes his school, “the number of square inches is of course divided by two." The same result is obtained with a line gauge which measures length and number of lines. But these devices are merely preliminaries to the elaborate systems for recording output, typist by typist, by day and by week, so that the number of lines transcribed from dictation, copied from other documents, etc., is subject to continuous check.16 Dictation time is also recorded, at first by the page and later, with the spread of dictation machines, by mechanical means. The object is a report which accounts for the time of every stenographer. The entire charting system resembles a factory production record, and is used in the same way for setting minimum standards and raising average standards of production.

As in the case of the factory, the system of production records is in itself a way of increasing output, apart from any changes in office methods. “As a means of knowing the capacity of every clerk," wrote Leffingwell, “and also as a means of spurring him to even better efforts, the planning department keeps daily records of the amount of work performed by each clerk and his relative efficiency. The keeping of such records alone has been known to greatly increase the efficiency of many offices." A great many of the effects obtained by scientific management came from this alone, despite the pretense that the studies were being conducted for purposes of methods improvement. When Leffingwell says, for example, that “the output of one clerk was doubled merely by the re-arrangement of the work on the desk," we may understand this was an effect of close and frightening supervision rather than a miracle of efficiency; this was understood by the managers as well, although concealed beneath a “scientific” mystique. 17

From the beginning, office managers held that all forms of clerical work, not just routine or repetitive ones, could be standardized and “rationalized." For this purpose they undertook elaborate studies of even those occupations which involved little routine, scores of different operations each day, and the exercise of judgment. The essential feature of this effort was to make the clerical worker, of whatever sort, account for the entire working day. Its effect was to make the work of every office employee, no matter how experienced, the subject of management interference. In this way, management began to assert in the office its hitherto unused or sporadically exercised right of control over the labor process.

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