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.
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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.
[...] 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.