Marx’s approach allows us to understand that the rising proportion of the labor force working in circulation and supervision represents an increasing cost to the system as a whole. This introduces an added complication to Marx’s theory of the tendency for the average profit rate to fall. What if a significant portion of the wage bill includes personnel who perform activities that do not produce value, as is the case with circulation and supervisory labor? Since these workers do not produce surplus value or, a fortiori, sufficient value to provide for their own reproduction, their wages must be paid out of surplus value produced by productive workers elsewhere in the economy, thereby drawing down the total surplus value available to capitalists for new investments. Since profits must be shared between productive and unproductive enterprises, the rising ratio of unproductive to productive labor represents an additional downward pressure on the profit rate. The increasing productivity of labor, in Marx’s sense of a rising rate of exploitation, must therefore compensate not only for the reduction in the total demand for labor relative to the capital mobilized, but for the increasing costs of circulation and supervision, as more and more labor is allocated to non-productive activity.