Re: [Marxism] Marx on management

[Michael Sims <mjsbpmagen-mxmail@xxxxxxxx>]

If I understand this correctly, the movement of goods adds value to
those goods.

If capital is an element of production, then the moving of capital adds
value to it.

Aspects of banking which haven't been considered are letters of credit
which facilitate  the movement of goods. LC's being part of the credit
system which enable production to take place earlier.

Was that of any help?

Michael

Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
> 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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