From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Sat Apr 22 2006 - 14:03:37 EDT
Jerry, You wrote: He also had this to say: " ... the wages of superintendence do not enter [into the] average rate of profit at all" (_Theories of Surplus Value_, III, Progress ed., p. 505). I cannot trace the context of this remark, but if I remember correctly Marx argued in these manuscripts against an apologetic interpretation of profit as the "wages of superintendence". His argument here seems to be, that this idea might make some sense only in the case of the old-style "functioning capitalist" who directly participates in the production process, but that in a full-fledged capitalist mode of production, the ownership function of capital and managerial functions are separated. Sometimes he suggests that the wages of management are a "faux frais of production" (a constant capital outlay). In that case, you would think that managerial labour in private enterprise is a capital cost met from sales revenues which enters into the cost structure of the product, but is it part of C, V, or S or none of these? There are these four logical possibilities given the theory. "Theories of Surplus Value" was written in 1863 and most of the manuscript of Cap. Vol. 3 was written after that. If managerial labour could be either productive or non-productive, as he later says, my hunch is we would need to examine more closely the real division of labour which operates, in order to ascertain the portion of each. But I think we can reject out of hand the idea that all managerial labour is non-productive; supposing all managerial labour was suddenly withdrawn, production would collapse, though probably the withdrawal of a portion of it would make little difference. The problem here is really that Marxists wanted to operate a quick classification schema without actually investigating all the different activities subsumed under managerial/supervisory/executive labour. This type of discussion also has some bearing on the debates about the Soviet bureaucracy. The Trotskyists and IS-type people (and some Maoists) claimed that the officialdom performed *no productive function* at all, by definition. But if you know a bit more about the reality of the organisation of production in the USSR, this assertion simply will not wash. Any mode of production based on a complex division of labour requires managerial labour of some kind, though we might dispute about what sorts are really technically indispensable, and how these tasks are allocated. See also: G. Duménil, D. Lévy, "The Emergence and Functions of Managerial and Clerical Personnel in Marx's Capital, pp. 61-81", 1994, in N. Garston, Bureaucracy: Three Paradigms, Kluwer Academic, Boston, Dordrecht, London, 1994. http://www.jourdan.ens.fr/~levy/ Once I get time, I aim to delve further into the theory of bureaucracy - I think the topic needs a good overhaul. How valid is it really to superimpose a schema from a previous epoch of history on current realities? Jurriaan
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