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

The problem of immense numbers of jobs which pay less than a “living wage," that is to say, less than the wage necessary to support a working-class family, to provide for the subsistence and reproduction of labor power, is, it is often assumed, resolved by the fact that multiple job holding within the same family is widely practiced. Indeed, in one way this must temper the problem, since the average number of jobs per family is between one-and-a-half and two, and this provides more income to many family units, although it increases the level of spending necessary for subsistence. But when one reflects upon the modes of life brought into being by this rapid change, and the tensions which result from the fact that millions of families are driven to multiple job holding in the absence of suitable conditions for child care, household care, etc., such a conclusion is far from certain. Surveys point out that discontent among workers goes up sharply in families that have more than one wage earner, despite the fact that income also goes up.8 Further, there is another factor that influences any conclusion here, and that is the existence of a large number of families that have difficulty keeping even one family member occupied full time. An article on the crisis of the underemployed in the New York Times Magazine points out:

It is true that, nationwide, the average family has 1.7 full-time equivalent workers. But the majority of low-income families in America are unable to find enough work to occupy more than one “full-time-equivalent"member. In 1970, the average number of “full-time-equivalent” workers per low-income family was less than one! In other words, one person (usually the male head) worked nearly (but not totally) full time, or several family members worked, but very sporadically. It is therefore useless——and cynical—to tell those for whom jobs do not exist that they could relieve their poverty if only they would be more willing to work. 19

That portion of the relative surplus population which Marx called “stagnant," irregularly employed and living in conditions of life that have fallen below the average normal level of the working class, and furnishing a “broad basis" for “special branches of capitalist exploitation," has grown to encompass huge proportions of the inner-city populations, considerable numbers in the depressed rural areas, and is on the increase in suburban regions. Its extent, at least in the core areas of the large cities of the United States, was carefully measured during the 1970 census by means of a questionnaire designed to study the relation between poverty and the job market. This Census Employment Survey (C.E.S.) produced some sixty-eight volumes of raw statistics, the analysis of which has been undertaken by the Subcommittee on Employment, Manpower, and Poverty of the United States Senate. The above-quoted article on underemployment, one of whose three authors is a staff member of that subcommittee, offers a summary of some of the findings of the C.E.S., and in particular of the effort to develop what is called a “subemployment index":

The failure of the social and economic system to provide people with adequate wages is hidden from view under the surface of traditional unemployment statistics. These statistics are excellent for measuring fluctuations in the economy but they do not go far enough as measures of the labor market. To gauge the degree of labor-market failure, it is necessary to know not only the magnitude of overt unemployment, but also the extent of worker discouragement (“discouraged workers" are those who have given up looking for jobs); the number of people who can find only part-time work; and the number who hold jobs but at inadequate pay. The subemployment index attempts to encompass all these factors.

In 1970, nationwide unemployment amounted to 4.9 per cent of the labor force (since then, it has hovered close to the 6 per cent mark month after month). In the C.E.S. central-city survey areas, the unemployment rate in 1970 was 9.6 per cent. This is very high. In France, the labor unions took to the streets last February when unemployment reached 2.6 per cent. But as high as it is here, the employment rate alone falls far short of revealing the full extent of urban crisis. When we look at the official definition of unemployment, we note that one cannot be “unemployed" unless one is currently looking for a job. It does not count those people who have given up looking for jobs after failing repeatedly to find work.

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How many such discouraged nonseekers are there? The C.E.S. enables us to make a dependable estimate. For example, in New York City, the conventional unemployment rate in 1970 averaged 8.1 per cent in the survey areas (compared with 4.4 per cent for the labor force of the city as a whole), but jumped to 11 per cent when the discouraged workers were added.

This adjustment begins to give us a picture of realities of economic life at the bottom of a city's social structure. But to this we must now add another category——part-time employed workers who would like to work full time but cannot find full-time jobs. The C.E.S. survey carefully separates people who wanted to work only part time from those who wanted to work full time, and in this way adds (again, for New York) another 2.3 percentage points to our emerging index of urban poverty. In other words, adding together the officially unemployed, the discouraged jobless and the involuntary part-time workers, we can now account for at least 13.3 per cent of the labor force in the New York City sample areas.

Our adjustments have nearly doubled the official unemployment figures for the sample areas and tripled the national rate of unemployment. But, still, they are far from complete. The last and most important part of the index is the worker who has a full-time job but does not earn enough to make ends meet.2º

For a definition of the income needed to “make ends meet," the authors go to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ itemized budget of consumption needs for a family of four in New York City. The Bureau compiled three such budgets, for the upper level at about \$19,000, for the middle level at about \$12,000, and for the lower levels at about \$7,000, all before taxes. The nature of the lower-level budget may be judged from the fact that it allows only \$100 a month for rent; all the rest of the budgeting is in line with this.

If we accept the B.L.S. figure of \$7,183 as the least a family of four must earn to keep its head above water in New York City in 1970 (the B.L.S.'s national urban average for 1970 was \$6,960), what does this require for the family's income earner? If he or she works 50 weeks a year, 40 hours a week (which is itself unlikely in the inner city), the answer is \$3.50 an hour. Here is the final link in our chain of employment statistics. For when we add those individuals who earn less than \$3.50 an hour to the discouraged nonseekers, the involuntary part-timers and the officially unemployed, the statistics take a horrifying leap. In the seven New York City sample areas, the subemployment rate rises to between 39.9 per cent and 66.6 per cent of the labor force. Indeed, the average

What other result could have been expected, when, as we have seen, in May 1971 the median usual weekly earnings of full-time workers in all occupational categories of the working class with the exception only of craftsmen and foremen were far below this minimal earnings level, and when the fastest growing occupational categories, those of clerical and service workers, were lowest of all?

Finally, the immense reservoir of subemployed labor holds on its lowest levels the pauperized layers of the population, that bottom sediment which is drawn into employment only infrequently, sporadically, and at peaks of“prosperity." “The more extensive, finally, the lazarus-layers of the working-class," Marx wrote, “and the industrial reserve army, the greater is official pauperism." According to his figures, the official list of paupers in England and Wales in 1865 was 971,433, and since the population count in the 1861 census was just over 20 million, official pauperism then constituted some 4.6 percent of the total population. In the United States, the closest thing we have to an official paupers' list is the roll of those requiring welfare assistance. In 1973, these rolls contained 14.8 million persons out of a total population of 210.4 million or 7 percent of the population (and 1973 was the fourth successive year when 7 percent or more of the population was to be found on the welfare rolls).²2 In this startling proportion one may see the post-World War II “prosperity" cycle in accordance with Marx's absolute general law of capitalist accumulation: the immense mass of social wealth and functioning capital, the extent and energy of capital accumulation, the growth of the absolute mass of the proletariat and the productiveness of its labor, the increasing relative mass of the industrial reserve army, of the mass of consolidated surplus population, and finally, the misery of “official pauperism." That this is a chain in which each link presupposes the rest, and in which “accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of misery" at the other, may no longer be doubted.

Notes

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Chapter 18

The “Middle Layers“ of Employment

In the discussion thus far we have restricted ourselves to that portion of the population, embracing as we have seen some two-thirds to three-fourths of the total, which appears readily to conform to the dispossessed condition of a proletariat. But the system of monopoly capitalism has brought into being a further mass of employment, not inconsiderable in size, that does not answer so readily to such a definition. Like the petty bourgeoisie of pre-monopoly capitalism (the petty proprietors in farming, trade, services, the professions, and artisan occupations), it does not fit easily into the polar conception of economy and society. But unlike that earlier middle-class mass, which has so largely evaporated, it corresponds increasingly to the formal definition of a working class. That is, like the working class it possesses no economic or occupational independence, is employed by capital and its offshoots, possesses no access to the labor process or the means of production outside that employment, and must renew its labors for capital incessantly in order to subsist. This portion of employment embraces the engineering, technical, and scientific cadre, the lower ranks of supervision and management, the considerable numbers of specialized and “professional” employees occupied in marketing, financial and organizational administration, and the like, as well as, outside of capitalist industry proper, in hospitals, schools, government administration, and so forth. Relatively, it is nowhere near so large as the old petty bourgeoisie which, on the basis of independent entrepreneurship, occupied as much as half or more of the population in the pre-monopoly stage of capitalism. It embraces in the United States today perhaps over 15 but less than 20 percent of total employment. Its rapid growth as a partial replacement for the old middle class, however, makes its definition a matter of special interest, all the more so since its purely formal character is similar to that of the clearly proletarianized working-class population.

The complexities of the class structure of pre-monopoly capitalism arose from the fact that so large a proportion of the working population, being neither employed by capital nor itself employing labor to any significant extent, fell outside the capital-labor polarity. The complexity of the class structure of modern monopoly capitalism arises from the very opposite consideration: namely, that almost all of the population has been transformed into employees of capital. Almost every working association with the modern corporation, or with its imitative offshoots in governmental or so-called nonprofit organizations, is given the form of the purchase and sale of labor power.

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The purchase and sale of labor power is the classic form for the creation and continued existence of the working class. Insofar as the working class is concerned, this form embodies social relations of production, the relations of subordination to authority and exploitation. We must now consider the possibility of the same form being made to conceal, embody, and express other relations of production. To take a most extreme example, the fact that the operating executives of a giant corporation are employed by that corporation, and in that capacity do not own its plants and bank accounts, is merely the form given to capitalist rule in modern society. These operating executives, by virtue of their high managerial positions, personal investment portfolios, independent power of decision, place in the hierarchy of the labor process, position in the community of capitalists at large, etc., etc., are the rulers of industry, act “professionally" for capital, and are themselves part of the class that personifies capital and employs labor. Their formal attribute of being part of the same payroll as the production workers, clerks, and porters of the corporation no more robs them of the powers of decision and command over the others in the enterprise than does the fact that the general, like the private, wears the military uniform, or the pope and cardinal pronounce the same liturgy as the parish priest. The form of hired employment gives expression to two totally different realities: in one case, capital hires a “labor force" whose duty it is to work, under external direction, to increase capital; in the other, by a process of selection within the capitalist class and chiefly from its own ranks, capital chooses a management staff to represent it on the spot, and in representing it to supervise and organize the labors of the working population.

Thus far the difference is clear, but between these two extremes there is a range of intermediate categories, sharing the characteristics of worker on the one side and manager on the other in varying degrees. The gradations of position in the line of management may be seen chiefly in terms of authority, while gradations in staff positions are indicated by the levels of technical expertise. Since the authority and expertise of the middle ranks in the capitalist corporation represent an unavoidable delegation of responsibility, the position of such functionaries may best be judged by their relation to the power and wealth that commands them from above, and to the mass of labor beneath them which they in turn help to control, command, and organize. Their pay level is significant because beyond a certain point it, like the pay of the commanders of the corporation, clearly represents not just the exchange of their labor power for money—a commodity exchange—but a share in the surplus produced in the corporation, and thus is intended to attach them to the success or failure of the corporation and give them a “management stake," even if a small one, The same is true insofar as they share in a recognized guarantee of employment, in the semi-independence of their mode of labor within the production process, in authority over the labor of others, the right to hire and fire, and the other prerogatives of command.

Judged by these and similar standards, the middle levels of administrative and technical employment clearly encompass a broad range of types. The engineering heads who design the production process merge into management at the top, and the hierarchy that stretches beneath them terminates in large drafting and design rooms which have been organized, in many instances, on the same principles as the factory or office production line, and are staffed by serried ranks of detail workers whose pay scales, if they are better than those of factory operatives or clerical workers, are perhaps not so good as those of craftsmen, and who dispose oflittle more working independence and authority than the production worker. In between are the subalterns and noncommissioned officers of the industrial army, the foremen, the petty “managers" of all sorts, the technical specialists who retain, if not authority, at least a tenuous working independence. And outside the corporations proper, in governmental, educational, and health establishments, these gradations are reproduced in forms peculiar to the work processes carried on in each of these areas.

Among these intermediate groupings are parceled out the bits of specialized knowledge and delegated authority without which the machinery of production, distribution, and administration would cease to operate. Each of the groupings serves as the recruiting ground for those above, up to and including top management. Their conditions of employment are affected by the need of top management to have within its orbit buffer layers, responsive and “loyal" subordinates, transmission agents for the exercise of control and the collection of information, so that management does not confront unaided a hostile or indifferent mass. These conditions are affected, moreover, by the privileged market position which specialized and technically trained labor possesses in the earlier phase of its development, at a time when the supply of such labor is only in the process of catching up with the needs of capital accumulation. All in all, therefore, those in this area of capitalist employment enjoy, in greater or lesser degree depending upon their specific place in the hierarchy, the privileges of exemption from the worst features of the proletarian situation, including, as a rule, significantly higher scales of pay.

If we are to call this a “new middle class," however, as many have done, we must do so with certain reservations. The old middle class occupied that position by virtue of its place outside the polar class structure; it possessed the attributes of neither capitalist nor worker; it played no direct role in the capital accumulation process, whether on one side or the other. This “new middle class," by contrast, occupies its intermediate position not because it is outsíde the process of increasing capital, but because, as part of this process, it takes its characteristics from both sides. Not only does it receive its petty share in the prerogatives and rewards of capital, but it also bears the mark of the proletarian condition. For these employees the social form taken by their work, their true place in the relations of production, their fundamental condition of subordination as so much hired labor, increasingly makes itself felt, especially in the mass occupations that are part of this stratum. We may cite here particularly the mass employments of draftsmen and technicians, engineers and accountants, nurses and teachers, and the multiplying ranks of supervisors, foremen, and petty managers. First, these become part of a mass labor market that assumes the characteristics of all labor markets, including the necessary existence of a reserve army of unemployed exercising a downward pressure on pay levels.\* And second, capital, as soon as it disposes of a mass of labor in any specialtya mass adequate in size to repay the application of its principles of the technical division of labor and hierarchical control over execution by means of a firm grasp on the links of conception—subjects that specialty to some of the forms of “rationalization" characteristic of the capitalist mode of production.

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In such occupations, the proletarian form begins to assert itself and to impress itself upon the consciousness of these employees. Feeling the insecurities of their role as sellers of labor power and the frustrations of a controlled and mechanically organized workplace, they begin, despite their remaining privileges, to know those symptoms of dissociation which are popularly called “alienation" and which the working class has lived with for so long that they have become part of its second nature.

In the chapter devoted to clerical labor, we have already described the manner in which an intermediate stratum was enlarged into a mass of working-class employment, and in the process divested of all its privileges and intermediate characteristics. It is not necessary to anticipate here a similar evolution of the specialized and lower-managerial employees in any near-term future. But it should be recognized that the difficulties experienced by those who, in the period before World War I, attempted to arrive at a “definition" of the class position of clerical employees are somewhat the same as the difficulties one must today confront in defining the intermediate strata of modern employment. These difficulties arise, in the last analysis, from the fact that classes, the class structure, the social structure as a whole, are not fixed entities but rather ongoing processes, rich in change, transition, variation, and incapable of being encapsulated in formulas, no matter how analytically proper such formulas may be.\* The analysis of this process requires an understanding of the internal relations and connections which serve as its motive power, so that its direction as a process may be understood. Only secondarily does the problem arise of“defining" the place of particular elements in the process, and this problem cannot always be solved neatly and definitively, nor, it should be added, does science require that it must be so solved.

Notes

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\* The first major instance of this came with the Depression of the 1930s, but in the rapid surge of capital accumulation and the transformation of industry that began with the Second World War this tendency was overcome. By the end of the 1960s, however, rising rates of unemployment among “professionals" of various kinds once more brought home to them that they were not the free agents they thought they were, who deigned to “associate themselves" with one or another corporation, but truly part of a labor market, hired and fired like those beneath them.

\* E. P. Thompson writes: “There is today an ever-present temptation to suppose that class is a thing. This was not Marx's meaning, in his own historical writing, yet the error vitiates much latter-day ‘Marxist' writing. ‘It,' the working class, is assumed to have a real existence, which can be defined almost mathematicallyso many men who stand in a certain relation to the means of production. . . .

"If we remember that class is a relationship, and not a thing, we cannot think in this way."1

Chapter 19

Productive and Unproductive Labor

In an earlier chapter devoted to the labor which produces services, we arrived at the conclusion that the existence of a working class as such does not depend upon the various concrete forms of labor which it is called upon to exercise, but rather its social form. Labor which is put to work in the production of goods is not thereby sharply divided from labor applied to the production of services, since both are forms of production of commodities, and of production on a capitalist basis, the object of which is the production not only of value-in-exchange but of surplus value for the capitalist. The variety of determinate forms of labor may affect the consciousness, cohesiveness, or economic and political activity of the working class, but they do not affect its existence as a class. The various forms of labor which produce commodities for the capitalist are all to be counted as productive labor. The worker who builds an office building and the worker who cleans it every night alike produce value and surplus value. Because they are productive for the capitalist, the capitalist allows them to work and produce; insofar as such workers alone are productive, society lives at their expense. 1f

The question then arises: What of those whose labor is unproductive? If, as Marx said, the difference between the Roman proletariat and the modern proletariat is that while the former lived at the expense of society, the latter supports society upon its shoulders, are unproductive workers to be omitted from the modern proletariat? To answer this question we must first gain a clear idea of the various kinds of unproductive labor that exist in capitalist society and their historical development.

The terms “productive” and “unproductive” labor derive from the extensive discussion which took place among the classical economists, and which Marx analyzed so thoroughly in the first part of his Theories of Surplus-Value, the uncompleted work that was drafted as a fourth volume of Capital. In order to understand the terminology it is necessary to grasp first of all that the discussion of productive and unproductive labor, as it was conducted by Marx, implied no judgment about the nature of the work processes under discussion or their usefulness to humans in particular or society at large, but was concerned specifically and entirely with the role of labor in the capitalist mode of production. Thus the discussion is in reality an analysis of the relations of production and, ultimately, of the class structure of society, rather than of the utility of particular varieties of labor.

Essentially, Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. This excludes all labor which is not exchanged against capital. Self-employed proprietors—farmers, artisans, handicraftsman, tradesmen, professionals, all other self-employed—are according to this definition not productive workers because their labor is not exchanged for capital and does not directly contribute to the increase of capital.\* Nor is the servant a productive worker, even though employed by the capitalist, because the labor of the servant is exchanged not against capital but against revenue. The capitalist who hires servants is not making profits, but spending them. It is clear that this definition has nothing to do with the utility of the labor employed, or even its concrete form. The very same labor may be either productive or unproductive, depending upon its social form. To hire the neighbor's boy to cut the lawn is to set in motion unproductive labor; to call a gardening firm which sends out a boy to do the job (perhaps even the same boy) is another thing entirely. Or, to put the matter from the point of view of the capitalist, to hire gardening labor to maintain his family's lawn is unproductive consumption, while to hire the very same gardening labor in order to realize a profit from its work is to set in motion productive labor for the purpose of accumulating capital.

A moment's reflection will show the importance of this distinction for the evolution of capitalist society during the past two hundred years. The change in the social form of labor from that which is, from the capitalist standpoint, unproductive to that which is productive, means the transformation from self-employment to capitalist employment, from simple commodity production to capitalist commodity production, from relations between persons to relations between things, from a society of scattered producers to a society of corporate capitalism. Thus the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, which disregards its concrete form in order to analyze it as a social form, far from being a useless abstraction, represents a decisive point in the analysis of capitalism, and shows us once more how social forms dominate and transform the significance of material things and processes.

The tailor who makes a suit on order for a customer creates a useful object in the form of a commodity; he exchanges it for money and out of this pays his own expenses and means of subsistence; the customer who hires this done purchases a useful object and expects nothing for the money other than the suit. But the capitalist who hires a roomful of tailors to make suits brings into being a social relation. In this relation, the tailors now create far more than suits; they create themselves as productive workers and their employer as capitalist. Capital is thus not just money exchanged for labor; it is money exchanged for labor with the purpose of appropriating that value which it creates over and above what is paid, the surplus value. In each case where money is exchanged for labor with this purpose it creates a social relation, and as this relation is generalized throughout the productive processes it creates social classes. Therefore, the transformation of unproductive labor into labor which is, for the capitalist's purpose of extracting surplus value, productive, is the very process of the creation of capitalist society.

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\* Even more, they fall outside of the distinction between productive and unproductive labor, because they are outside the capitalist mode of production. See the clear and comprehensive presentation of Marx's theory of productive and unproductive labor by Ian Gough.'

Classical political economy, both Ricardian and Marxian, confronted a world in which the largest part of labor could still be reckoned as unproductive (according to the above definitions) because it did not contribute directly to the increase of capital. Much of the history of the capitalist nations during the past two centuries is the account of the destruction of these forms of labor, so that from a dominant share of social labor these forms have been reduced to an insignificant share. This is another way of saying what was pointed out earlier: that the capitalist mode of production has subordinated to itself all forms of work, and all labor processes now pass through the sieve of capital, leaving behind their tribute of surplus.

However, all labor that enters into the capital accumulation process and is necessary for it is not thereby rendered productive. For it is also true that productive labor which serves as the foundation of capitalist society is labor which produces commodity value. just as capitalism, as a system, cannot escape from the productive processes upon which society is based, no matter how remote from production its upper reaches may become, so commodity value is the ultimate foundation upon which all forms of value—money, credit instruments, insurance policies, shares, etc., etc.—depend. For the capitalist who is in the business of producing commodity values, the aim is always to capture as great a margin over his costs as possible. But in order to do this, he must realize the commodity values, transforming them into money form. Thus even for the industrial capitalist, who is producing in order to sell, commercial functions arise within the firm. For the commercial capitalist, who, apart from the functions of distribution, storage, packaging, transportation, display, etc., simply buys in order to sell, this realization problem constitutes the essence of his business altogether.

With the routinization of the processes of producing value and surplus value, the attention of the capitalist is increasingly centered upon this realization problem, the solution of which becomes even more important than the creation of value. At the same time, as the surpluses created in production become ever more immense, the use of capital simply for purposes of credit, speculation, etc., increases enormously. In this latter case, what is involved is the appropriation of portions of the surplus commodity value which arises in production. These two functions, the realization and the appropriation by capital of surplus value, engage, as we have seen, enormous masses of labor, and this labor, while necessary to the capitalist mode of production, is in itself unproductive, since it does not enlarge the value or surplus value available to society or to the capitalist class by one iota.

The receivables clerk who keeps track of outstanding accounts, the insurance clerk who records payments, the bank clerk who receives deposits all of these forms of commercial and financial labor add nothing to the value of the commodities represented by the figures or papers which they handle. Yet this lack of effect is not due to the determinate form of their labors—the fact that they are clerical in nature. Clerical labor of similar and sometimes identical kinds is used in production, storage, transportation, and other such processes, all of which do contribute productively to commodity value, according to the division of productive labor into mental and manual sides. It is due rather to their occupation with tasks which contribute only to the realization of value in the market, or to the struggle of competing capitals over value, and its transfer and redistribution according to individual claims, speculations, and the “services” of capital in the form of credit, etc.

Labor may thus be unproductive simply because it takes place outside the capitalist mode of production, or because, while taking place within it, it is used by the capitalist, in his drive for accumulation, for unproductive rather than productive functions. And it is now clear that while unproductive labor has declined outside the grasp of capital, it has increased within its ambit. The great mass of labor which was reckoned as unproductive because it did not work for capital has now been transformed into a mass of labor which is unproductive because it works for capital, and because the needs of capital for unproductive labor have increased so remarkably. The more productive capitalist industry has become—that is to say, the greater the mass of surplus value it extracts from the productive population—the greater has become the mass of capital seeking its shares in this surplus. And the greater the mass of capital, the greater the mass of unproductive activities which serve only the diversion of this surplus and its distribution among various capitals.

Modern bourgeois economics has completely lost the power to treat the question of productive and unproductive labor, in part because of this historical change. Since, in the days of Smith and Ricardo, unproductive labor existed primarily outside the ambit of capital, classical bourgeois economics found it wasteful, and urged its reduction to the minimum. But ever since the mass of unproductive labor has been virtually destroyed outside the corporation and recreated on a different foundation within it, bourgeois economics, which, as a branch of management science, views all things through the eyes of the bourgeoisie, finds it impossible to retain its old attitude. The modern corporation has developed unproductive labor in this form out of necessity, and out of necessity has given over the narrow and pennypinching ways of its predecessors, whose first rule was to “keep overhead down” and to devote all possible resources to production. “Spend millions to make millions" has become the slogan, and this phrase, in all its variations in modern corporate chatter, is generally understood to indicate the spending of millions in marketing, advertising, promotion, speculation; these are the areas into which disposable corporate income is channeled, while production has become relatively routinized and expenditures in that field flow in measured and predictable amounts.

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For economists today, therefore, the question of “productive" or “unproductive" labor has lost the great interest which it had for the early bourgeois economists, just as it has lost interest for capitalist management itself. Instead, the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applied to labor of all sorts, even labor which has no productivity. It refers, in bourgeois parlance, to the economy with which labor can perform any task to which it is set by capital, even those tasks which add nothing whatever to the wealth of the nation. And the very idea of the “wealth ofnations" has faded, to be supplanted by the concept of "prosperity," a notion which has nothing to do with the efficacy of labor in producing useful goods and services, but refers rather to the velocity of flow within the circuits of capital and commodities in the marketplace.

The enormous quantities of socially useless labor that enter into this circulation, therefore, are in the minds of the modern ideologists of capital merged into the general processes of labor, just as they are so merged in the minds of the managers. All labor processes are adjudged equally useful—including those which produce, realize, or divert the surplus. The productive and unproductive forms of labor are mingled, in individual firms and in the economy as a whole, on an equal footing. And the organization of labor in the unproductive aspects of corporate activity follows the lines laid down in the productive sector; the labor of both sectors becomes, increasingly, an undifferentiated mass.

In early capitalist enterprises the unproductive labor employed in small quantities was, generally speaking, a favored stratum, closely associated with the employer and the recipient of special privileges. Those who worked with him in fulfilling the sales, accounting, speculative, and manipulative functions represented to him associates in the guarding and expansion of his capital as capital, in distinction from those in production who represented his capital only in its temporary form as labor. The few who kept his books, sold his products, negotiated on his behalf with the outside world, and in general were privy to his secrets, hopes, and plans, were in fact associates in the exploitation of productive workers, even if they themselves were only employees. The productive worker, on the other hand, represented the social relation between capital and labor, since this worker was the “direct means of creating surplusvalue." “To be a productive worker is, therefore,"Marx wrote, “not a piece of luck, but a misfortune."² Those who aided the capitalist in the circulation of his capital, the realization of his profit, and the management of his labor, gained privileges, security, and status from this function, and thus to be an unproductive worker was in itself a piece of good fortune that contrasted with the misfortune of the worker in production.

Now, however, marked changes have occurred in the relations between productive and unproductive workers within the corporation. On the one hand, the process of productive labor has become, more than ever before, a collective process. It is only the body of productive workers which fashions the ultimate product; each worker can no longer be considered productive in the individual sense, and the definition of productive labor applies only to the body of workers taken as a whole. On the other side, the unproductive labor of the corporation, having been so tremendously expanded, has been given the same twofold structure as productive work by the capitalist division of labor. The individual functionary, closely associated with the capitalist, has, as we have described, given way to the department or division of the corporation, in which only the heads remain associated with capitalist management while the rest occupy positions akin to those of workers in production. Thus while, on the side of productive labor, the individual worker loses those characteristics as producer of a finished commodity which made him or her a productive worker, and retains those characteristics only in the mass, on the side of unproductive labor a mass has been created which shares in the subjugation and oppression that characterizes the lives of the productive workers.

The unproductive functions, having evolved from special and privileged occupations closely associated with capital into divisions of corporate activity or even into capitalist “industries" separate and complete in themselves, have now produced their armies of wage-workers whose conditions are generally like those of the armies of labor organized in production. And just as, for corporate management, the problems of the organization of the labor process in production and outside production become increasingly similar, just so for workers the distinction between the various determinate forms of labor punch press or typewriter, key punch or assembly line, stockroom or filing room, machine tool or bookkeeping machine—become less and less significat. In the modern office and factory the gap between the forms and conditions of labor that loomed so large in the early counting house and shop now dwindles. Although they were at one time a means of escaping the “misfortune" of being a productive worker, the unproductive occupations have, in the armies of labor employed at their bases, for the most part lost their attractiveness and become merely another form of exploitation. From being privileged positions in which one could to a small extent share in the benefits derived by capital from productive labor, they have become mere cogs in the total machinery designed to multiply capital. And this remains true despite the fact that, technically speaking, all those who do not themselves produce commodity values must perforce consume a portion of the commodity values produced by others. In the modern corporation, and for the mass of labor which it employs, this distinction has lost its social force as a line of division between proletarians and middle class: that line can no longer be drawn as roughly corresponding to the division between productive and unproductive workers, but must be inscribed elsewhere in the social structure. Thus Marx's aphorism must be modified, and it must now be said that to be a wage-worker is a misfortune.

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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:

1. 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.

1. 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."

1. 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.

1. 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."

1. 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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\* 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

Having marked out these various characteristics of commercial labor, Marx has, it is clear, outlined the problem as it exists in all its modern dimensions. The unproductive labor hired by the capitalist to help in the realization or appropriation of surplus value is in Marx's mind like productive labor in all respects save one: it does not produce value and surplus value, and hence grows not as a cause but rather as a result of the expansion of surplus value.

What is also clear, however, is that Marx neither anticipated nor attempted to anticipate the extent of the growth of a commercial wage-working stratum and its transformation into a commercial proletariat. In this, as everywhere else in Marx, the limits of speculation are clear and definite: analysis is used to lay down the principles and never to speculate on the eventual result should those principles continue to operate indefinitely or over a prolonged period of time.\* It is also clear that Marx grasped the principles with his customary profundity and comprehensiveness, in a manner which neglected no part of the architecture of the capitalist system and its dynamics of self-reproduction.

That which in Marx was a subordinate and inconsequential part of the analysis has thus for us become a major consequence of the capitalist mode of production. The few commercial wage-workers who puzzled Marx as a conscientious scientist have become the vast and complicated structure of occupations characteristic of unproductive labor in modern capitalism. But in so becoming they have lost many of the last characteristics which separated them from production workers. When they were few they were unlike productive labor, and having become many they are like productive labor. Although productive and unproductive labor are technically distinct, although productive labor has tended to decrease in proportion as its productivity has grown, while nonproductive labor has increased only as a result of the increase in surpluses thrown off by productive labor—despite these distinctions, the two masses of labor are not otherwise in striking contrast and need not be counterposed to each other. They form a continuous mass of employment which, at present and unlike the situation in Marx's day, has everything in common.

Notes

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\* To understand this, it is necessary to keep in mind that Marx was not only a scientist but also a revolutionary; that so far as he was concerned the capitalist mode of production had already operated for a sufficiently long period of time; and that he anticipated not its prolonged continuation but its imminent destruction, a conviction which is part of the armament of all working revolutionaries.