[Marxism] Marx on management

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

I am very grateful for your classification, Ahmet, but it seems to me odd to
conflate

- the production activities of bank workers, with acts of exchange
themselves,
- productive labour, with a person who does the labour,
- the task of the work, with the output of the work
-the social characterisation of the work, with its economic effect.

To make transactions incurs a cost - that cost reflects, in part, that those
transactions actually have to be produced, and to produce them takes work
(although to an extent that work can be automated).

If a bank worker produces numbers, or he produces reports, or he produces
personal services, that is production like any other. If that work is done
on a profit basis (it yields private profit), it is capitalistically
productive, I think. The bank worker performs surplus labour like any other.

It could be argued, as Marx does in his manuscript, (1) that what the bank
work accomplishes, is only a transfer of surplus-value or wealth (interest,
bank charges, dividends etc.), without making net new additions to it, and
that (2) therefore from the standpoint of the class of capital owners as a
whole, this is an "unproductive" cost, insofar as it does not increase the
mass of profit itself (but even this idea could be questioned, since a
fraction of the mass of profit could not even be appropriated or realised
except through the activities of bank work; but Marx argues this is
precisely why owners of capital are prepared to incur the impost of bank
services).

In that case, then by the nature of the activity, the direct source of the
profit realised by banks as gross income is not the bank-work itself - this
surplus-value is an appropriation of gross income (in the form of interest
etc.) from other sectors. But from this, it does not necessarily follow that
the work which operates this transfer is not production, or not productive.
This requires an additional assumption, namely that only work which directly
makes net additions to the mass of profit is capitalistically productive.

As far as I remember, in your book "Measuring the Wealth of Nations", bank
services are included in the value of gross output and net output. By
definition, therefore, bank services are at the very least production, since
gross and net output measure the value of (current) production, whereby
"factors of production" are applied by resident institutional units to
transform inputs into outputs (the national accounts definition). If bank
work is not production, then bank work should theoretically be excluded from
gross product and the valuation of gross product altogether, sort of like a
kind of "intermediate consumption".

The underlying dispute really concerns

(1) the principles used for valuing the net output. Which income &
expenditure is part of the value of gross product, and which is not? What is
the conceptual coverage of gross product?  How is the sphere of production
demarcated? My own argument, which I haven't published yet in detail, is
that it is not really satisfactory simply to take over the official concept
and coverage of gross product, and reaggregate it, since part of the circuit
of capital is really excluded from it.

(2) the significance of the social characterisation of productive labour.
Since Marx finally defines productive labour purely in terms of the social
relations of production that apply, does the concept of productive labour
necessarily have implications for social accounting principles at all, and
if so, what are they?

(3) the evolution  and modification of the social and economic division of
labour, on the basis of changing class relations and technological change.

Jurriaan




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