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In a society where labor power is purchased and sold, working time becomes sharply and antagonistically divided from nonworking time, and the worker places an extraordinary value upon this “free” time, while on-the-job time is regarded as lost or wasted. Work ceases to be a natural function and becomes an extorted activity, and the antagonism to it expresses itself in a drive for the shortening of hours on the one side, and the popularity of labor-saving devices for the home, which the market hastens to supply, on the other. But the atrophy of community and the sharp division from the natural environment leaves a void when it comes to the “free” hours. Thus the filling of the time away from the job also becomes dependent upon the market, which develops to an enormous degree those passive amusements, entertainments, and spectacles that suit the restricted circumstances of the city and are offered as substitutes for life itself. Since they become the means of filling all the hours of “free” time, they flow profusely from corporate institutions which have transformed every means of entertainment and “sport” into a production process for the enlargement of capital. By their very profusion, they cannot help but tend to a standard of mediocrity and vulgarity which debases popular taste, a result which is further guaranteed by the fact that the mass market has a powerful lowest-common-denominator effect because of the search for maximum profit. So enterprising is capital that even where the effort is made by one or another section of the population to find a way to nature, sport, or art through personal activity and amateur or “underground” innovation, these activities are rapidly incorporated into the market so far as is possible.
The ebbing of family facilities, and of family, community, and neighborly feelings upon which the performance of many social functions formerly depended, leaves a void. As the family members, more of them now at work away from the home, become less and less able to care for each other in time of need, and as the ties of neighborhood, community, and friendship are reinterpreted on a narrower scale to exclude onerous responsibilities, the care of humans for each other becomes increasingly institutionalized. At the same time, the human detritus of the urban civilization increases, not just because the aged population, its life prolonged by the progress of medicine, grows ever larger; those who need care include children—not only those who cannot “function” smoothly but even the “normal” ones whose only defect is their tender age. Whole new strata of the helpless and dependent are created, or familiar old ones enlarged enormously: the proportion of “mentally ill” or “deficient,” the “criminals,” the pauperized layers at the bottom of society, all representing varieties of crumbling under the pressures of capitalist urbanism and the conditions of capitalist employment or unemployment. In addition, the pressures of urban life grow more intense and it becomes harder to care for any who need care in the conditions of the jungle of the cities. Since no care is forthcoming from an atomized community, and since the family cannot bear all such encumbrances if it is to strip for action in order to survive and “succeed” in the market society, the care of all these layers becomes institutionalized, often in the most barbarous and oppressive forms. Thus understood, the massive growth of institutions stretching all the way from schools and hospitals on the one side to prisons and madhouses on the other represents not just the progress of medicine, education, or crime prevention, but the clearing of the marketplace of all but the “economically active” and “functioning” members of society, generally at public expense and at a handsome profit to the manufacturing and service corporations who sometimes own and invariably supply these institutions.
- The fact that banking corporations produce nothing, but merely profit from the mass of capital in money form at their disposal through activities which once went by the name “usury,” no longer subjects them to discredit in monopoly capitalist society as it once did in feudal and in early capitalist society. In fact, financial institutions are accorded a place at the pinnacle of the social division of labor. This is because they have mastered the art of expanding capital without the necessity of passing it through any production process whatsoever. (The magical appearance of the feat merely conceals the fact that such corporations are appropriating a share in the values produced elsewhere.) The cleanliness and economy of the procedure, its absolute purity as a form of the accumulation of capital, now elicit nothing but admiration from those who are still tied to production.
From the point of view of capital, the representation of value is more important than the physical form or useful properties of the labor product. The particular kind of commodity being sold means little; the net gain is everything. A portion of the labor of society must therefore be devoted to the accounting of value. As capitalism becomes more complex and develops into its monopoly stage, the accounting of value becomes infinitely more complex. The number of intermediaries between production and consumption increases, so that the value accounting of the single commodity is duplicated through a number of stages. The battle to realize values, to turn them into cash, calls for a special accounting of its own. Just as in some industries the labor expended upon marketing begins to approach the amount expended upon the production of the commodities being sold, so in some industries the labor expended upon the mere transformation of the form of value (from the commodity form into the form of money or credit)—including the policing, the cashiers and collection work, the recordkeeping, the accounting, etc.—begins to approach or surpass the labor used in producing the underlying commodity or service. And finally, as we have already noted, entire “industries” come into existence whose activity is concerned with nothing but the transfer of values and the accounting entailed by this.
billboard piece - stripe! lol
[...] Leffingwell calculated that the placement of water fountains so that each clerk walked, on the average, a mere hundred feet for a drink would cause the clerical workers in one office to walk an aggregate of fifty thousand miles each year just to drink an adequate amount of water, with a corresponding loss of time for the employer. (This represents the walking time of a thousand clerks, each of whom walked only a few hundred yards a day.) The care with which arrangements are made to avoid this “waste” gives birth to the sedentary tradition which shackles the clerical worker as the factory worker is shackled—by placing everything within easy reach so that the clerk not only need not, but dare not, be too long away from the desk.
Essentially, Marx defined productive labor under capitalism as labor which produces commodity value, and hence surplus value, for capital. This excludes all labor which is not exchanged against capital. Self-employed proprietors—farmers, artisans, handicraftsman, tradesmen, professionals, all other self-employed—are according to this definition not productive workers because their labor is not exchanged for capital and does not directly contribute to the increase of capital.* Nor is the servant a productive worker, even though employed by the capitalist, because the labor of the servant is exchanged not against capital but against revenue. The capitalist who hires servants is not making profits, but spending them. It is clear that this definition has nothing to do with the utility of the labor employed, or even its concrete form. The very same labor may be either productive or unproductive, depending upon its social form. To hire the neighbor’s boy to cut the lawn is to set in motion unproductive labor; to call a gardening firm which sends out a boy to do the job (perhaps even the same boy) is another thing entirely. Or, to put the matter from the point of view of the capitalist, to hire gardening labor to maintain his family’s lawn is unproductive consumption, while to hire the very same gardening labor in order to realize a profit from its work is to set in motion productive labor for the purpose of accumulating capital.
For economists today, therefore, the question of “productive” or “unproductive” labor has lost the great interest which it had for the early bourgeois economists, just as it has lost interest for capitalist management itself. Instead, the measuring of the productivity of labor has come to be applied to labor of all sorts, even labor which has no productivity. It refers, in bourgeois parlance, to the economy with which labor can perform any task to which it is set by capital, even those tasks which add nothing whatever to the wealth of the nation. And the very idea of the “wealth of nations” has faded, to be supplanted by the concept of “prosperity,” a notion which has nothing to do with the efficacy of labor in producing useful goods and services, but refers rather to the velocity of flow within the circuits of capital and commodities in the marketplace.
a nice little riposte against the idea of productivity figures
- To understand this, it is necessary to keep in mind that Marx was not only a scientist but also a revolutionary; that so far as he was concerned the capitalist mode of production had already operated for a sufficiently long period of time; and that he anticipated not its prolonged continuation but its imminent destruction, a conviction which is part of the armament of all working revolutionaries.
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In the form given to it by Jerome in the sentence cited above, the phrase upon which the issue turns is “average skill.” Since, with the development of technology and the application to it of the fundamental sciences, the labor processes of society have come to embody a greater amount of scientific knowledge, clearly the “average” scientific, technical, and in that sense “skill” content of these labor processes is much greater now than in the past. But this is nothing but a tautology. The question is precisely whether the scientific and “educated” content of labor tends toward averaging, or, on the contrary, toward polarization. If the latter is the case, to then say that the “average” skill has been raised is to adopt the logic of the statistician who, with one foot in the fire and the other in ice water, will tell you that “on the average,” he is perfectly comfortable. The mass of workers gain nothing from the fact that the decline in their command over the labor process is more than compensated for by the increasing command on the part of managers and engineers. On the contrary, not only does their skill fall in an absolute sense (in that they lose craft and traditional abilities without gaining new abilities adequate to compensate the loss), but it falls even more in a relative sense. The more science is incorporated into the labor process, the less the worker understands of the process; the more sophisticated an intellectual product the machine becomes, the less control and comprehension of the machine the worker has. In other words, the more the worker needs to know in order to remain a human being at work, the less does he or she know. This is the chasm which the notion of “average skill” conceals.
hee
In his 1978 book The Act of Reading, Iser provides an account of what happens in the mind as a reader approaches literature. He argues that reading is a fundamentally dual process, consisting of both active and passive components. Critics, with much encouragement from Wallace, have tended to imagine the reader as engaging only in what Iser dubs "passive syntheses," or the experience of getting swept along by a story. This experience must be supported, however, by the active component, in which the reader produces the story under the guidance of the text. Such activity is necessary because literature differs from biography, or any other fact-based narrative genre, in its deliberate isolation from the way things operate in the external world. Instead of having recourse to a common reality that the audience shares with both writer and characters -- so that all are parts of the same network, and what happens in the story maintains a link with "actual events" -- a novel must establish for the reader how the world between its covers operates. Because nothing in the world of the novel is given, what Iser calls a "fundamental asymmetry between text and reader" exists, in which the text guides, but only the reader can fill in the missing background if communication is to be succesful.