From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Wed Nov 08 2006 - 13:21:56 EST
If they are paid out of profits, why do the wages of superintendence not enter into the formation of the average rate of profit? I've seen a few car factories in my time but never was a paid employee in one. I cannot really judge the economic relation as regards supervisors in a car plant. What would realistically happen if you didn't have those supervisors, i.e. if you removed them? In the US in 2002, you had about 16 million people classified as "managers/executives" of some description and about 9 million classified as supervisors (BLS data). That's a total of 25 million people or so in an employed civilian labour force of 137 million at that time, or about 18% (one in 5.5 employees approximately). I do not really know US society sufficiently well to know what supervisors actually do there, of course they could be just "office cocks" etc. (but a large number are women). The concept of value added is a statistical concept aiming to measure an economic relationship. It is equal in gross terms as gross output less intermediate consumption; in net terms, you also deduct consumption of fixed capital. Basically the aim of the concept of value added is to measure the netted value of new outputs from production, created in an accounting period, where production is defined as the activity of residential institutional units in transforming inputs into outputs, that generates money-incomes. You are correct, Marx's concept of value-creation is different from the statistical concept; at best the statistical concept is only an empirical indicator of the trend, and you have to rework the data to get more sense out of it. I have sketched a Marxian concept of the value product here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value_product In order to verify the productive role of managerial/supervisory labour, you would have to examine all the different categories of that activity that there are, and see what it is that they actually do, e.g. do they mainly exercise only a control function, or do they mainly perform a productive coordinating function that is an essential part of a production process (or do they engage in straightforward production). In national accounts, stock options and profit-sharing arrangements are often included in "compensation of employees", although they can be a simple appropriation of profit income. In principle, the value of managerial labour power is equal to its normal reproduction cost, taking into account training expenditure etc. but I admit managerial salaries are often very inflated, i.e. price deviates from real value. Nevertheless, you can establish broad averages or social norms of what a manager of a given type costs, in a given society. But there are many factors influencing it, e.g. supply/demand, skill monopolies etc. Especially in the 1990s, everybody wanted to be a "manager", because it had the prospect of more pay. I realise that many "managers" in fact aren't. I have never argued that "We should, as radical political economists, let corporate accounts and management define which employees are productive or surplus value and which are not". But I think statistical and accounting information is useful, as an approximate gauge of the real proportions of social phenomena. Main thing about a statistical concept is that it freezes or fixes a phenomenon that in reality is in constant motion. We cannot measure anything directly, if it is in constant motion, other than as an inferred (probabilistic) relationship. We need among other things discrete counting units which in some sense abstract from time. I wouldn't call myself an empiricist, but unlike many Marxists, I do believe in the utility and importance of empirical data. Otherwise I would be talking only vague rhetoric. A good Marxian treatise on management and managerialism is long overdue. By "good" I mean thoroughly realistic, rather than ultraleftist. Jurriaan
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Thu Nov 30 2006 - 00:00:06 EST