Re: [Marxism] Marx on management

[ertugrul ahmet tonak <eatonak@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

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.

This representation of our view (Shaikh, Savran, and myself) is not
accurate.  The following quote from our book Shaikh & Tonak: 1994) might
further clarify what I meant in my previous post:

"The identification of that labor which produces surplus value --in
other words, that labor which is productive of capital-- immediately
allows us to specify its two salient properties:

a) it is a wage labor which is first exchanged against capital (i.e.
capitalistically employed);

b) it is labor which creates or transforms use values (i.e. it is
production labor).

The definition derived here is identical to the one Marx (Capital I: 644
--Penguin/Vintage edition) uses to characterize productive labor.  All
other labor is thereby unproductive of capital, either because it is
production labor that produces direct use values or commodities but not
capital, or because it is nonproduction labor.  Thus even
capitalistically employed wage labor can be unproductive of capital if
it is distribution or social maintenance labor [e.g. workers in finance
sector, including those in banking --EAT] (Marx, Capital I: 1042
--Penguin/Vintage edition).

.....

> 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".
>

You remember wrongly.  We explicitly included finance related activities
(and associated flows) to our category of Secondary Flows about which we
said the following:

"Secondary flows are part of total transactions, but not part of total
value or total product." (Shaikh and Tonak. 1994:53).

And, obviously we did not include those workers who work in banking
sector (which is actually a sub-sector of the sector of finance in the
US NIPA) in our estimation of variable capital ("wages of productive
laborers).  (Shaikh and Tonak. 1994: Appendix G).


--


I was recently asked whether universities should teach
values.  My response was that universities, whether
implicitly or otherwise, always, always teach values.
They teach values in the way they hire and treat employees.

Ruth Simmons
President, Brown University

------------------------------------------
E. Ahmet Tonak
Simon’s Rock College of Bard
Great Barrington, MA 01230

Phone:  413-528 7488
Fax:    413-528 7365
Cell:   413-329 7856

Homepage: www.simons-rock.edu/~eatonak



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