structural waste of capitalism

Only some quick thoughts to offer I'm afraid.

Sales and marketing is an absolutely massive resource hog. The drug industry for example, spends twice as much in a year on marketing as they spend on research. An enormous amount of labour in industries that actually provide necessary services (e.g. water, electricity etc.) is spent on billing, accounting, etc. While there will have to be some form of tracking resources and organising allocation of them in a communist society it would certainly take on a different form.

Of course, the biggest monster of them all is the "defence" industry. The war machine has become a bloated monstrosity with vast resources being poured into it. In the first Gulf War they dropped more bomb tonnage on Iraq than were used in the entire 2nd World War!

The war industry is closely connected with state in general with its armies of police, intelligence agencies, social services, tax collectors, etc.

Yeah, I'd be very interested in keeping abreast of anything you come up with Robin.
I'm afraid i don't have any useful information to be honest. Perhaps another line of enquiry would be to look at things from an energy-efficiency perspective as well.

In the drive to increase the technical composition of capital and reduce the reliance on labour forced on capital by working class struggles in the agricultural sector, energy inputs per unit energy output of that sector have steadily risen. The stats for Rice production in Japan are below , and these stop in 1974 (!), but the stats for the whole sector in the USA are crazy. I can't find them on a quick google- but it could be a very fruitful additional line of inquiry

1950 1955 1970 1974
Energy Input (fuel, fertilizers, machines, etc) 9,140 13,350 36,960 47,010

Energy Output (calorific value of the rice) 11,600 14,800 17,300 17,700

Output/Input 1.27 1.11 0.47 0.38

You'd think some big organisation like the CNT or CGT might have commissioned something like this. They could probably get a few students to do it as some degree/masters/PhD thing, couldn't they?

Or perhaps - http://www.anarchist-studies-network.org.uk/

Some interesting points about useful and useless labour. In fact, this debate relates to concepts of productive and unproductive labour found in Marx's works. The two dichotomies have some similarities but they are distinct concepts.

Useful labour is that which fulfills a human need as determined materially or socially, i.e. it has a use value. Now, to take marketing for example, this does fulfill a need for a bourgeois to persuade customers to buy his products. So you are correct that for capitalism this is useful labour.

But marketing is not productive labour for capitalism in that it doesn't, of itself, produce surplus value. Although marketing and sales may assist this or that individual capital valorise surplus value already extracted from its workers, the marketing industry is actually a burden on the system as a whole and represents a diversion of resources that could have been used for accumulation, i.e. expanded means of production, etc. This is because it doesn't actually produce any value of its own, but is paid for through the revenue of past and present production by other capitalists. In this sense, it is similar to the unproductive nature of state expenditure.

As for comparing capitalism to communism, I disagree that such comparisons are worthless. Surely the very basis of struggling for a communist society rests on a comparison which presumably finds communism the better of the two! It is nothing other than the competing perspectives of the two dominant classes of today, bourgeoisie and proletariat. The proletarian view looks aghast at the vast labour and material resources pumped into marketing, arms production, finance etc. which could be used instead to improve human living standards.

There is also a historical dimension to this question. Sales and marketing was virtually non-existent in the 19th century. It has become more and more dominant as capital has grown and its productive capacity has massively outstripped that of the market. The sharpening of competition drives individual capitals to launch ever more massive psychological assaults on consumers to persuade them to buy beyond their means, buy this company's product rather than that one, etc. In other words as capitalism has grown its been forced to support more and more (even in its own terms) burdensome activity. This represents the fundamental contradictions of capitalism - the processes that drive the activities of individual actors within the system become more and more destructive to the system as a whole. Once these processes reach a certain threshold, they plunge the system into self-destructive irrationality.

Hi John

Regarding your previous point about the difficulty in distinguishing between socially useful and socially useless work in capitalism I think it is possible to make a distinction. While both categories are indispensable to capitalism almost by definition and to that extent are inseparable, what we are talking about is what constitutes "socially useful work" from the standpoint of meeting human needs and this alone . From this standpoint much of the work carried on in capitalism cannot be considered socially useful but is neccesitated purely by the systemic or functional requirements of capitalism itself

Hence the structural waste of capitalism would be completely invisible to someone who knows no alternative to capitalism and accepts the latter as pre-given. This is the case with most researchers and explains the difficulty one has in trying to tease out relevant information from the data provided - because the categories used by researchers are simply not designed to throw light on the extent of strucutural waste in capitalism. That can only be glimpsed from a perspective that transcends capitalism and that requires a definition of "socially useful work" as only that work which contributes in any meaningful direct sense to the betterment of human welfare

Cheers

Robin

Hi Joseph

I think the point about the structural waste of capitalism is that it is almost by definition activity that does not contribute to human welfare in any meaningful sense but arises from commercial exigencies of the system itself. Strictly speaking it will ALL be eliminated in a post capitalist or communist society. What you are referring to is the kind of labour (e.g. stock control accounting) which does not immediately appear socially useful but is in fact indispensable to a system based on direct production for use. Since it is necessary to such a system it is ipso facto socially useful to such a system

cheers

Robin

Hi Robin, JK,

My point is that we can never identify useful and useless labour under capitalism. If we accept (which we do seem to) that actually under capitalism the work that you want to label 'useless' is actuallly often necessary in order to achieve the 'useful' labour, then surely the 'useless' labour is actually part of the production of the 'useful' labour, and so can't be simply written off as a structural waste.

Obviously, we agree that some kind of post-capitalist society might be more 'useful'. So, the argument seems to be something like - let's imagine what a post-capitalist society would look like, with a particular focus on the socially-useful labour that would proliferate there - and then let's compare that with what we do now. But my point, again, is that you aren't comparing like things, so the comparison is sort of meaningless. I mean, it may actually take a fraction of the effort to produce some of the things you've labelled 'socially useful' in capitalist society when you come to do them in post-capitalist society - once the limits to human capacity created by the capital relation are removed.

I just don't see how (a) you can decide what is socially useful and what is socially useless - especially when they both seem to be necessary for the production of the other; (b) what mode of production you are comparing capitalism with when you say that it is possible to produce the socially-useful stuff with less labour - especially if we accept that in a post-capitalist society all production will be less labour-intensive (because we will have overcome the multiple limits to capital that continually hold back humanity).

In other words, society, due to the industrial revolution, became more productive which eventually (though painfully, at first) raised the standard of living and for the first time in history created a middle class with disposable income.

In other words a recession or depression; supply out runs demand and the middle class once again disappears. I have a feeling the developed world is in for a nasty one sometime soon. My country (the US) exports nothing but capital and jobs these days. Soon we'll be nothing but an island of unemployed white collar workers and service industry employees with no customers. We'd burn our money for fuel except that we hold it digitally these days and most of that will be claimed by creditors when the shit hits the fan.

I think one of the fundamental flaws here is the shortsightedness of investment. With capitalism, if an investment in labor and capital doesn't produce a meaningful return in a persons lifespan then it is viewed as inefficient and the investment goes to something with more immediate results. While this kind of philosophy works great on an individual basis it doesn't work in a world with limited resources and unlimited needs over the span of many lifetimes.

Back to the topic of structural waste of capitalism vs. communism; I think we are yet to witness a large scale communist economy that hasn't over produced some goods while drastically under producing others. Whether its a financial speculator trying to guess where the next flare up of demand is going to be or a worker's council trying to guess exactly how many widgets are needed, there will always be waste. It depends on your definition of waste. To a capitalist it is a waste when his investments bring goods or services to market at a loss; in other words, an inefficient allocation of resources. To a communist it is when a capitalist brings those goods and services to market (which requires pencil pushers, bankers, bean counters, etc.) and he does realizes a gain on his investment; in other words, an inequitable allocation of resources since profit is stolen and given to people who don't produce the good or service. So for communism to be less wasteful in the equitable sense you have to accept some losses on your investment in labor and capital (doesn't matter who owns the capital, someone still has to invest resources and man power to build the machines of industry) or learn how to more efficiently place labor and capital without the profit motive (which is what I believe these workers councils are all about, correct?) or do both.

I believe this is fundamentally a question of efficiency vs. equality. I don't think we have the technology to attain both (yet.) So I really think we're looking at two very different definitions of "waste" here.

PS - Hello everyone! My first post on this board.... great reading so far!

Capitalists are continuously bragging about the effiency of the market. It is indeed an efficient killer. It's fun to think of studying how otherwise inefficient it is below the facade.

-----

I don't believe that efficiency, in any system, should be an end in itself. While it's cool to criticize Capitalism's waste, we must not fail to realize that optimal human development takes priority over efficiency, even at the cost of some waste. We try to eliminate the waste, but not to the detriment of people.

Hi all

Here's something I came across which is of relevance to the question of structural waste - Pieter Lawrences's pamphlet on socialism - http://www.pieterlawrence.com/11903.html In particular , read chapter 9 and 10 which contains some useful data

Cheers

robin

but for example it would be stupid to abolish the division of labour in the name of egalitarianism, because we'd all be reduced to self-sufficient farming. however, a communist definition of efficiency includes within it people as human beings, so whereas a capitalist would see, e.g. Ford's production lines as efficient (or Toyota's teams, as is the vogue), a communist would point out these methods reduce that which is most 'valuable' - human life - to a mere resource to be consumed, and the supposed 'efficiency' follows from there. instead we would still seek to assess effort/reward, but would include ourselves in the criteria, e.g. a workers council is still going to assess whether it's worth spending so many man-hours on project a or project b or on leisure, but as the people making the decision are those who will implement it, their own needs (as non-alienated producers-consumers) are included in the assessment of efficiency.

it's something to be decided collectively, we decide what we want done, divide it up on a voluntary basis and then divide the leftovers (sewer cleaning etc) on a rota, (or alternatively allow sewer cleaners and the like to do less than the social average work time). you'd pretty soon see labour-saving innovations in shitty but necessary tasks, that's for sure.

of course people are free to do what they like outside of this minimum commitment, which essentially is a way of arriving at a realisation of 'from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.'

in so many ways. mind you if you mixed it with super-soakers with laser sights it could be quite a laugh one day a year.

i don't think it is. it's an argument against people in China working 18 hour shifts when we do 8, but it's not an argument against a global division of labour per se. in fact ironically it's only in a global communist gift economy that ricardo's notion of 'comparative advantage' could really be turned into a social benefit - e.g. some regions are going to have certain particularities suited to certain production, e.g. extractive industries or climate for wine grapes (ricardo's favourite example), but this wouldn't preclude a globally federal-arranged division of labour, aggregating our desired consumption with an acceptable working day, although the particulars of labour thus divided in each region will be distinct (of course the elimination of nation-states and border regimes would also be a check on inter-regional exploitation).

unnecessary - there are shit tasks locally, the sewer cleaning example being the most obvious, which can be divided up. if for some reason a given region inevitably requires more shitty tasks than average, there are several courses of action, from reducing the minimum average work* hours to letting migration average things out.

* i'm using work here loosely, obviously i'd imagine productive activity will be qualitatively transformed when it is carried on in non-alieanated conditions, though menial tasks will no doubt persist.