[Marxism] Marx on management

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

The definition of productive labour is a controversial topic in Marxian
economics. But Marx's final view, expressed in Capital Vol. 1, is that what
makes labour productive from a capitalist point of view has nothing to do
with the particular nature of the productive activity involved, but rather
whether or not it generates or adds to private profit. It's a
social-institutional definition, not a technical one. Of course, Marx
considers no net new value is generated by acts of exchange in themselves,
and in this sense he talks about e.g. bank workers as unproductive workers
from the soial point of view.

But bank workers are producers like any other, and if their labour creates
profit, they are productive workers like any other from a capitalist point
of view. How the flows of income involved should be accounted for socially,
is a separate question, related to the valuation and definition of the gross
product.

Really Marx implies that (1) circulation activities transfer value (transfer
claims to output), rather than create net additions to it, and that (2)
there is no "neutral" definition possible of productive labour, and one has
to ask "productive for whom?".

What is a source of profit to one sector is a cost to another - the aim is
normally to reduce that cost, and arguments may be made that it is an
"unproductive" cost which does not add to profit. But that is a sectoral
bias.

> From a class point of view, one might say that some imposts or costs on
production are "unproductive" for the majority of owners of capital at
anytime, while the "productivity of others is hotly disputed. All have a
stake in maximising the volume of surplus-value receipts of course, but how
to increase that volume, beyond the idea that workers should work harder and
work more for less money, is a subject of dispute.

Beyond a certain limit, more work done does not yield more surplus-value
because the costs involved in that increase begin to outweigh the benefits
(social and health effects, etc.). The ability to work more or less depends
a lot on (1) power relationships, specifically market power, bargaining
strength at every level, (2) the organic composition of capital. In general,
the number of hours worked in the West have declined longterm due to both
factors, i.e. superior market power and increased productivity.

But most Marxists make the mistake of adopting a static definition of
productive labour. In reality, the social and economic division of labour
changes all the time, the definition of profitable activity changes, and
institutional or property relations also change. Therefore productive labour
is not a timeless category, other than in the sense that it is labor capable
of forming a surplus-product in excess of whatever value it takes to
maintain the producer. So depending on the kinds of technologies and
organisation used, the boundaries of productive labour may shift in the
course of time.

One of the aims of privatisation is to transform unproductive labour more
into productive labour in the defined sense, i.e. yielding profit. The
argument is that this makes everything more efficient and effective, i.e.
more profit at less cost, but the "costs" taken into account are often only
the costs to enterprises, not society as a whole. If privatisation puts
100,000 workers on the dole, it might be "efficient" from one point of view,
but not from the point of view of these workers' lives,, or from the point
of view of all the social problems this causes.

Additionally most Marxists make the mistake of all regarding managerial and
supervisory labour as unproductive. In fact Marx himself explicitly
acknowledges that management and supervision combines productive
coordinating functions with control functions. To understand to what extent
management or supervision is productive or not, requires a very detailed
look at what managers actually do, i.e. whether they mainly exercise only a
control function but add nothing to profit, or whether they are mainly an
integral part of the planning and coordinating process required to keep
production going.

Many managers are no no different position than any other worker, indeed
they might work longer hours; the only difference is more responsibility
(which can mean more pay). Many can be thrown out of their jobs as well,
because their superiors decide that their services do not constitute
productive labour, in the sense of adding to profit.

Essentially though Marx thought that the basis of the general capitalist
definition of productivity is the technical and value composition of capital
together (the organic composition), i.e. the least workers at the lowest
cost working with and maintaining the most capital equipment, producing the
largest output. But that is obviously not a neutral definition, it is a
definition from the point of view of the enterprise owners. What is
productive for human life, might be quite a different story.

Here in Holland, the press reported today that employers and unions had
agreed that the producivity of workers has to increase, i.e. more work has
to be done and more has to be invested to improve quality of work and
personnel. To an extent it's rhetoric, because the Dutch work very hard,
it's just that one in three works parttime. At the same time, the press
reported that a new study published in the The Lancet estimates that
one-third of the adult world population will suffer from high blood pressure
by 2025. That's increased stress. Of course, it might not be work stress;
being unemployed (as I am at present) can be just as stressful.

Jurriaan



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