From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Thu Apr 20 2006 - 13:12:09 EDT
Marx himself had this to say about supervision and management labour: "The work of supervision and management necessarily arises everywhere when the direct production process takes the form of a socially combined process, and does not appear simply as the isolated labour of separate producers. It has, however, a dual nature. On the one hand, in all labour where many individuals cooperate, the interconnection and unity of the process is necessarily represented in a governing will, and in functions that concern not the detailed work but rather the workplace and its activity as a whole, as with the conductor of an orchestra. This is productive labour that has to be performed in any combined mode of production. On the other hand - and quite apart from the commercial department - this work of supervision necessarily arises in all modes of production that are based on opposition between the worker as direct producer and the proprietor of the means of production. The greater this opposition, the greater the role that this work of supervision plays. It reaches its high point in the slave system." Source: Karl Marx, Das Kapital Vol. 3 (1894), Dietz ed. p. 397. Pelican edition, p. 507 (translation corrected). As you can see, Marx thought (in contrast to e.g. Fred Moseley) that managerial and supervisory labour had both a technically indispensable *productive* function and a *social control* function, which combined in various admixtures. This importantly affects the estimate of variable capital, since e.g. in the USA there are about 25 million or so managers/supervisors/executives (BLS data), and total compensation of corporate officers is about a sixth or a fifth of the total salary bill (excluding employee benefits etc), at least for corporations with a psitive profit (IRS data). Jurriaan
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