robbo203
7th December 2009, 12:24
Recent data for workforce composition for the UK give the following breakdown:
Services (81%),
Manufacturing(18%)
agriculture etc (1%)
Unemployment 7.5% (Q3 2009)
A roughly similar composition can be found in other developed capitalist economies.
This raises a vital point which is often neglected or overlooked but is in fact becoming increasingly central to the case for a moneyless wageless communist commonwealth - the tendency for capitalism to generate an increasingly larger and larger volume of "structural waste" , in both relative and absolute terms.
What is meant by this? Basically it refers to the extent of activities (and the resources that go with these activities), that do not actually serve to satisfy human needs in any useful or meaningful sense, that do not actually enhance human welfare in any way. Such activities exist solely to expedite the functioning of capitalism, to lubricate the wheels of commerce and to facilitate the extraction of surplus value. They serve the systemic needs of capitalism and nothing else.
The great majority of these wasteful activities - "wasteful" (or redundant)from the point of view of meeting human needs - are to be found in the services sector which as the above data shows is by far the largest sector of the economy and becoming ever more dominant (a process called "tertiarisation"). These include everything from banking to tax collecting to the check-out staff working the tills at your local supermarket. However, the manufacturing or secondary sector contains a significant amount of structural waste as well. An obvious case in point is weapons production. Weapons are produced in order to wage wars and wars in contemporary capitalism, communists maintain. are rooted in conflicts between rival capitals over trade routes, resources and so on which would no longer obtain in a coperative communist wommonwealth in which the productive resources of the world are commonly owned. Ergo. armaments production would disappear . But there are other jobs too that fall within the manufacturing sector that would also go - like the salespeople that sell the goods that factory produces and the pay staff that calculate the wages of the factory workers and so on.
How large is the extent of structural waste in capitalism? It has certainly been rising relentlessly in recent decades. Fred Moseley in his book The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy (Macmillan 1991) maintained that in the post war era there has been a significantly higher rate of growth in unproductive labour compared to productive labour in the US economy - in fact the ratio doubled in the post war years up to the 1970s and continued to grow (but at a slower rate) since then - and this is the reason for the the US economy's difficulties today. However unproductive labour is not the same thing as socially useless labour. Unproductive labour is a category which Marx developed from Adam Smith and refers to labour which does not produce surplus value but rather is paid out of surplus value. Some unproductive labour can actually be actually be socially useful - a teacher in a comporehensive school , for example whereas, conversely, some socially useless labour can be highly productive - like the worker in the factory that produces arms that are sold at a profit on the international market.
Ken Smith in his groundbreaking book Free is Cheaper (1988, John Ball Press) did an industry-by-industry analysis of the UK economy and came up with the astounding conclusion that over 90% of work done in formal sector of the economy could be classed as socially useless. I think this figure is probably a bit on the high side but Ken's basic methodology is sound His conclusions are highly significant.
What he is saying is in effect that with only 10% of the current employed workforce we could effectively produce the same amount of "useful stuff" and services that the whole of the formal sector (everyone who is employed) produces today. To put it differently (if somewhat crudely) in a moneyless free-access communist economy , the amount of work that individuals need to do to maintain the same "living standards" they have today - assuming the overall workload is equitably shared - would be drastically reduced. We would not be talking about a 40 hour week but only a handful of hours per week. Not only that since we would have got rid of huge amount of structurally wasteful activities associated with capitalism, the strain that we put on the environment in terms of resoruce extraction etc would likewise be drastically reduced. This is a point that environmentalists need to take on board
I would maintain that this issue of the structural waste of capitalism highlights ever more starkly the obsolesecence of capitalism and the massive technological potential that we already have to put in place a genuine comunist alternative - all that is lacking is the mass communist coinsciousness and the will to establish comunism.
If this is the case then this has radical repercussions for the Left. All the baggage of the past - the talk of transitional societies and proletarian dictatorships and what not - needs to be completely jettisoned. This is the language of a mindset informed by the inescapable scarcities of 19th century. However, we have long ago moved away from this situation. Scarcity today is no longer something that has to be endured. Rather, it is something that is systematically imposed by capitalism itself since capitalism simply cannot cope with the idea that we can have enough to satisfy all our reasonable needs.
In perpetuating those concepts - like the idea of a transitional society in which the means of production can be further developed - the Left is actually, albeit inadvertently, aiding capitalism and reinforcing the ideology of inevitable scarcity which capitalism uses to justify its own existence. By exposing the massive structural waste assoiated with capitalism we can very effectively counter this justifcation
Services (81%),
Manufacturing(18%)
agriculture etc (1%)
Unemployment 7.5% (Q3 2009)
A roughly similar composition can be found in other developed capitalist economies.
This raises a vital point which is often neglected or overlooked but is in fact becoming increasingly central to the case for a moneyless wageless communist commonwealth - the tendency for capitalism to generate an increasingly larger and larger volume of "structural waste" , in both relative and absolute terms.
What is meant by this? Basically it refers to the extent of activities (and the resources that go with these activities), that do not actually serve to satisfy human needs in any useful or meaningful sense, that do not actually enhance human welfare in any way. Such activities exist solely to expedite the functioning of capitalism, to lubricate the wheels of commerce and to facilitate the extraction of surplus value. They serve the systemic needs of capitalism and nothing else.
The great majority of these wasteful activities - "wasteful" (or redundant)from the point of view of meeting human needs - are to be found in the services sector which as the above data shows is by far the largest sector of the economy and becoming ever more dominant (a process called "tertiarisation"). These include everything from banking to tax collecting to the check-out staff working the tills at your local supermarket. However, the manufacturing or secondary sector contains a significant amount of structural waste as well. An obvious case in point is weapons production. Weapons are produced in order to wage wars and wars in contemporary capitalism, communists maintain. are rooted in conflicts between rival capitals over trade routes, resources and so on which would no longer obtain in a coperative communist wommonwealth in which the productive resources of the world are commonly owned. Ergo. armaments production would disappear . But there are other jobs too that fall within the manufacturing sector that would also go - like the salespeople that sell the goods that factory produces and the pay staff that calculate the wages of the factory workers and so on.
How large is the extent of structural waste in capitalism? It has certainly been rising relentlessly in recent decades. Fred Moseley in his book The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy (Macmillan 1991) maintained that in the post war era there has been a significantly higher rate of growth in unproductive labour compared to productive labour in the US economy - in fact the ratio doubled in the post war years up to the 1970s and continued to grow (but at a slower rate) since then - and this is the reason for the the US economy's difficulties today. However unproductive labour is not the same thing as socially useless labour. Unproductive labour is a category which Marx developed from Adam Smith and refers to labour which does not produce surplus value but rather is paid out of surplus value. Some unproductive labour can actually be actually be socially useful - a teacher in a comporehensive school , for example whereas, conversely, some socially useless labour can be highly productive - like the worker in the factory that produces arms that are sold at a profit on the international market.
Ken Smith in his groundbreaking book Free is Cheaper (1988, John Ball Press) did an industry-by-industry analysis of the UK economy and came up with the astounding conclusion that over 90% of work done in formal sector of the economy could be classed as socially useless. I think this figure is probably a bit on the high side but Ken's basic methodology is sound His conclusions are highly significant.
What he is saying is in effect that with only 10% of the current employed workforce we could effectively produce the same amount of "useful stuff" and services that the whole of the formal sector (everyone who is employed) produces today. To put it differently (if somewhat crudely) in a moneyless free-access communist economy , the amount of work that individuals need to do to maintain the same "living standards" they have today - assuming the overall workload is equitably shared - would be drastically reduced. We would not be talking about a 40 hour week but only a handful of hours per week. Not only that since we would have got rid of huge amount of structurally wasteful activities associated with capitalism, the strain that we put on the environment in terms of resoruce extraction etc would likewise be drastically reduced. This is a point that environmentalists need to take on board
I would maintain that this issue of the structural waste of capitalism highlights ever more starkly the obsolesecence of capitalism and the massive technological potential that we already have to put in place a genuine comunist alternative - all that is lacking is the mass communist coinsciousness and the will to establish comunism.
If this is the case then this has radical repercussions for the Left. All the baggage of the past - the talk of transitional societies and proletarian dictatorships and what not - needs to be completely jettisoned. This is the language of a mindset informed by the inescapable scarcities of 19th century. However, we have long ago moved away from this situation. Scarcity today is no longer something that has to be endured. Rather, it is something that is systematically imposed by capitalism itself since capitalism simply cannot cope with the idea that we can have enough to satisfy all our reasonable needs.
In perpetuating those concepts - like the idea of a transitional society in which the means of production can be further developed - the Left is actually, albeit inadvertently, aiding capitalism and reinforcing the ideology of inevitable scarcity which capitalism uses to justify its own existence. By exposing the massive structural waste assoiated with capitalism we can very effectively counter this justifcation