Surplus Value and Public Sector Workers - Socialism at work?

[Evo2]

Hi

In my reading of Marxist Economics, from what I understand, if surplus value is extracted via the unpaid labour time of a worker (which is the sole source of profit) then it follows that public sector workers are paid the full days worth of their labour, after deductions for the national funds (I'm talking as a worker living in the UK, so by this I refer to national insurance etc), and therefore are not exploited.

This of course only applies if the if government organisation is not pursuing commercial interests and is therefore providing goods and services for use and not for exchange value, such as the HMRC and the NHS in the UK.

However If a government organisation was pursuing commercial interests, that is production for exchange value and not just for use value, such as government organisations in the PRC and the former coal mines in the UK, then the organisation (and by extension the government as well) are engaging in state capitalism, via extracting surplus value from the workers.

Therefore a glimpse of how a socialist society would be work, albeit with deficient democratic workers control, can be seen in the NHS and HMRC since the workers here receive the full days worth of labour, unless they are faced with cuts and pay freezes because of the private sector crises.

Thoughts?

[RedMaterialist]

Hi

In my reading of Marxist Economics, from what I understand, if surplus value is extracted via the unpaid labour time of a worker (which is the sole source of profit) then it follows that public sector workers are paid the full days worth of their labour, after deductions for the national funds (I'm talking as a worker living in the UK, so by this I refer to national insurance etc), and therefore are not exploited.

First, how does one follow from the other? You would have to show what the value of the public sector work is and how much is paid for it.

Besides, there are many very well paid public sector people, such as David Cameron, who produce nothing of value, except for daily apologies for capitalism. As in, "Capitalism is bad, but there is no alternative."

The money paid to people like Cameron and Thatcher has to come out of somebody's pocket and that means surplus value taken from value producing public sector workers, among others.

[Tim Cornelis]

If it's not capitalism, it does not follow that therefore it's socialism. The workers in public healthcare are still confronting the objective conditions of their labour as alien property and sell their labour-power to an employer. High-paid public professionals do not differ from the salaried functionaries of capital whom may or may not own it (the functional bourgeoisie)

[Dave B]

Theoretically it is not necessarily the case that all workers produce surplus value.

Before moving onto the cases mentioned it might be helpful to analyse some simple 'anecdotal' situations.

Put in its simplest and obvious form; surplus value is generated by employing someone to make something to sell that has a higher value than what you have to the pay worker to make it.

And as a capitalist, capitalists mostly employ workers with that object in mind.

However a capitalist may directly employ for example domestic servants to clean his toilets and wipe his arse etc rather than for producing commodities for sale.

These workers will be paid out of the part of the capitalist’s own surplus value or profit that he sets aside as part of his own consumption fund (or what he spends on himself).

So domestic servants etc are paid out of the ‘consumption fund’ part surplus value rather than produce it.

However just because a domestic servant does not produce surplus value it does not mean that they are not exploited or receive 10 hours pay for 10 hours of work [ human effort or work in general-or in other words abstract labour].

If they did they would get paid more than industrial workers.

The wider industrial working class as free sellers of their labour power are practical people and take the easiest work for the most pay and thus ‘set’ or have set for them the market value for all labour power; and the rate of exploitation which has to be the same for all sellers of labour power.

If the wages of an industrial worker for 10 hours general [abstract] labour can only buy what 8 hours of general labour can produce in stuff, then so it is for the domestic servant.

As a thought experiment you could have a pair of identical twins one working in domestic service and the other in a cotton mill with both receiving the same wages and consumables; and both working just a hard or performing the same quantity of abstract labour.

What that means I suppose is that is that the capitalists get their domestic workers on the cheap, at a discounted price, or perhaps only have ‘pay for’ 4 and get 5 etc.


“According to Marx” domestic labour [or service] is not the only kind of labour that the capitalist class ‘find necessary’ to pay for out of their consumption fund which is only part of the surplus value they receive from the general production of commodities.

They also need to pay for commercial workers and government orientated state workers out of the same consumption fund.

You can get into extremely complicated grey areas about to what extent some of this ‘service work’ is necessary and directly part of the productive process or where some of that labour can embodied in actual ‘stuff’.

The benchmark might be whether or not it would still be performed in a society of moneyless communism.

As to the other kinds of examples.

If we go back to, for example, the UK in 1970’s say.

We would have the perhaps exaggerated case were coal, gas, electricity, water, transport system and workers health service and education were run by the state.

And for arguments sake we could say that all of these industries didn’t produce a profit or “surplus value” *.

Thus the industrial capitalists would only have to pay 8 hours worth of labour power for every 10 hours worth of gas coal and electricity.

[well added value]

However they would still sell their final products at the full price and hence the surplus value or profit that was due to the state industries would be transferred to the general national capitalist class.



Things are more straightforward were state industries are providing direct products and services [as constant capital and raw materials] for the capitalist class themselves.

However the capitalist class themselves can benefit from their own workers being able to buy their ‘bread’ etc at discounted prices as they can pay them less.

Thus, ordinarily, the coal that a worker has to buy from a proper capitalist is sold at ‘cost of production’ + surplus value.

So when the coal that the worker buys to keep warm is sold at just the cost of production his employer deducts the surplus value, due to the commodity coal, from his wages and keeps it for himself.

There is a classical ‘Marxist’ example of this general [I]principle re the corn law. As below.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/07/09.htm

The workers bread carried a surcharge or surplus profit that went to the other ruling class; the landowning class.

The industrial capitalists didn’t like that as the landowners surplus profit came out of the surplus wages that the industrial capitalists had to pay.

[The industrial capitalists obviously didn’t even pretend to care about the price of bread as far as it affected the price of their own consumables and the dent it made on their own consumption fund.]

The lowering of the price of bread enabled the industrial capitalists to lower wages; and as is pointed out the idea that it would result in more ‘bread’ for the workers was as much a charade as the idea that the capitalist care about the workers anymore than slave owners do about theirs.


Some of the things that workers need to reproduce their labour power or keep going, and ordinarily paid for out of wages can even be provided for free eg healthcare and education.

When they are; the national capitalist class in general effectively pays for it for them out of deducted wages.

In fact it is a sensible system for the national capitalist class as the working class are always tempted towards irresponsible profligacy when it comes to the sensible allocation of their wages to unexpected contingencies.

And especially the young ones would be inclined to piss it up against the wall on holidays in Tenerife etc.

Not everyone can be a sober Methodist allocating a sensible proportion of their wages into welfare funds of friendly societies etc.

The capitalist class can benefit twice and get more for less due to economic efficiencies of scale and national organisation of these kinds of services.

The trouble comes when other extra national capitalists benefit from subsidised services and products etc.

eg

American workers skipping across the border pretending to be the general wage slaves of Canadian capitalists and healthcare tourism in general.

National brain drains of the best that free education can provide eg Sri Lankan doctors and Polish computer programmers or whatever.

And the belief that other national capitalists are exporting their reserve army of unemployed to be looked after by the welfare funds of other capitalist states.

*you have wary of state industries apparently not making a profit or surplus value. As real surplus value can be created and seem disappear in the accumulation of value in fixed and working capital required to keep up with general advances in technology etc. as opposed to the mere replacement of worn out capital.

In fact in general you have to be careful not to confuse total surplus value with the more conspicuous consumption fund of the capitalist class.

Thus some capitalists and capitalist enterprises will plough back or reinvest most of their surplus value into the business from which it was obtained.

Thus dividends and nominal profits can superficially appear to be low.

The surplus value however should reappear in increased capital value and share price of the business.

Which is why you have to be careful correlating the rate of profit with the inverse of price/ “earnings” ratio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93earnings_ratio


Lenin understood enough about his state capitalism to understand that Bolshevik surplus value was for;

c + v + s s — accumulation —maintenance of the state

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/oct/x01.htm#fwV42P358F01

[Slavic]

^
Good analysis. Another thing to keep in mind when considering public sector workers and non-industrial workers is that production of surplus value does not necessitate a production of profit. Profit is achieved when the commodities produced from surplus labor are exchanged on the market. Public sector departments which employ workers but do not exchange commodities on a market may not generate a profit, but they still benefit from a surplus labor if they don't pay their workers the full value of their labor.

Instead of striving for profits, you can theorize that public entities strive for efficiency of the service they are providing, naturally from the exploitation of its workers. Lets look at the military for an example. A public entity on the surface that exists to provide a service and does not engage in commodity exchange on a market. The military does not make a profit, instead it focuses on improving the efficiency of its service. The more exploited the workers, the greater the surplus labor, the more service provided from worker wages.

[Evo2]

Wow thanks for the in depth response :)