ARE UNPRODUCTIVE LABOURERS PART OF THE PROLETARIAT?

A precise definition of productive labour under capitalism is not only of theoretical importance. It also has major implications for social book-keeping (calculation in value terms of the national income)57 and significantly affects our analysis of social classes and the political conclusions we draw from it.

The narrowest position, which seeks to reduce the proletariat to the group of manual industrial workers, is in complete contradiction with Marx’s explicit definition of productive labour, and we need not dwell on it here. At the other extreme, it is obviously absurd to extend the concept of the proletariat to all wage and salary earners without limitation (including army generals and managers earning 100,000 dollars a year). The defining structural characteristic of the proletariat in Marx’s analysis of capitalism is the socio-economic compulsion to sell one’s labour-power. Included in the proletariat, then, are not only manual industrial workers, but all unproductive wage-labourers who are subject to the same fundamental constraints: non-ownership of means of production; lack of direct access to the means of livelihood (the land is by no means freely accessible!); insufficient money to purchase the means of livelihood without more or less continuous sale of labour-power. Thus, all those strata whose salary levels permit accumulation of capital in addition to a ‘normal’ standard of living are excluded from the proletariat. Whether such accumulation actually takes place is in itself irrelevant (although monographs and statistics tend to confirm that, to a modest or sizeable degree, this social group does engage in it; this is the case especially of the so-called managers, who – notwithstanding a platitude which continues to circulate in spite of all evidence to the contrary – are part and parcel of the capitalist class, if not necessarily of its top layer of billionaires).

This definition of the proletariat, which includes the mass of unproductive wage-earners (not only commercial clerks and lower government employees, but domestic servants as well), and which considers productive workers in industry as the proletarian vanguard only in the broadest sense of the word, has been challenged recently by several authors.58 It was, however, undoubtedly the one advanced by Marx and Engels and their most ‘orthodox’ followers: the mature (not the senile) Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin, Trotsky, Luxemburg et al.59 But it raises a weighty objection. If only productive labour produces value and thereby reproduces the equivalent of its own wages (besides creating surplus-value),60 does this not imply that the wages of unproductive labour are paid out of surplus-value produced by productive labour? And in that case, does there not arise a major conflict of interests between productive and unproductive labour, the first seeking to reduce surplus-value to a minimum, the second wishing it to be increased? How can such a basic conflict of interest be reconciled with the inclusion of both sectors in the same social class? Furthermore, should the industrial workers not be opposed to any expansion of state expenditure, even in the realm of ‘social services’, since this is financed in the last analysis through an increase in surplus-value extracted from them?

This objection can be countered at two levels. To begin with, it is not true that all unproductive labour is paid out of currently produced surplus-value. An important part of that labour (e.g. commercial employees, workers in the financial sector and those in unproductive service industries) is paid not out of currently produced surplus-value, but out of that portion of social capital which is invested in these sectors. Only the profits of these capitals form part of currently produced surplus-value. It is true that social capital is the result of past extortion of surplus-value. But this applies also to variable capital, i.e. to wages currently paid out to productive workers. The important point here is that, since wages and salaries in all these sectors are not drawn from currently produced surplus-value, their payment in no way reduces the currently paid wages of productive workers.61

Part of the wages bill of unproductive labour, however, is financed out of currently produced surplus-value. This concerns essentially the wages and salaries of state employees in public services and administration (not, of course, the state industries, where autonomous commodity production and therefore value production occur). But in order to conclude from this that a reduction of state expenditure entails a reduction of surplus-value and an increase in real wages (or, which amounts to the same thing, that the rise in state expenditure has occurred through an increase in surplus-value and a reduction in real wages), it would be necessary to undertake a very detailed analysis of the trend of the rate of exploitation and of workers’ living standards and needs since the ‘explosion’ of state expenditure. Such an examination is clearly beyond the scope of this introduction, but two crucial points should be made.

First, the concept of ‘gross wages’ (i.e. wages before tax) has no meaning in Marxist economic theory. Wages are means of reconstituting the worker’s labour-power through the purchase of commodities and services. Thus money deducted from the worker’s ‘gross wage’ to help the state buy aeroplanes has nothing at all to do with wages. It is from the outset part of social surplus-value. (Of course, if fresh taxes actually lower previously attained levels of real wages, they may indeed be said to have increased the rate of surplus-value. But again this will be measured by comparing successive amounts of net – real – wages, and not’ gross wages’.)

Similarly, it would be absurd to construe state medical, educational or transport services which help reconstitute the worker’s labour-power (or maintain his family under normal living conditions) as derived from surplus-value; they represent rather a socialized portion of the wage, regardless of whether it passes through the form of ‘state revenue’, and regardless of whether it ‘originated’ in ‘gross wages’ (taxes paid by the worker), ‘gross profits’ (taxes paid by the capitalist), or the ‘gross income’ of independent middle classes.62

It thus proves meaningful after all to examine the impact of a rise or fall in state expenditure on average working-class living standards, independently of its servicing (mediation) by unproductive state employees. Where these living standards decline, the conclusion is obvious: the total price of labour-power (individual plus ‘socialized’ wages) has been reduced. Where they rise, however, no sophism can prove that this entails an increase in social surplus-value. (To be sure, it could be accompanied by such an increase, but then so could a rise in real direct wages. ‘Accompanied by’ is not synonymous with ‘caused by’, except for people with faulty logic.)

As Marxist economic theory rejects the notion of a rigid ‘wages fund’, any analysis of the effects of varying levels of state expenditure upon the rate of exploitation would have to be aggregate and dynamic. Nothing flows automatically from either the expansion or contraction of state expenditure.