Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century. John Smith
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high-paying professions were now subject to international competition came as something of a shock.”60 Under the subheading “This time it’s personal,” Blinder concluded, “Many people blithely assume that the critical labor-market distinction is, and will remain, between highly educated (or highly skilled) people and less-educated (or less-skilled) people…. The critical divide in the future may instead be between those types of work that are easily deliverable through a wire … and those that are not.”61
Services made up 75 percent of the GDP of “high-income countries” in 2013, but only 22 percent of their gross exports,62 but this understates their contribution because services also form part of the value added of exported manufactured goods. “While the share of services in gross exports worldwide is only about 20 percent,” reports UNCTAD, “almost half (46 percent) of value added in exports is contributed by service-sector activities, as most manufacturing exports require services for their production.”63
Clearly, a concept of the globalization of production that concentrates exclusively on manufacturing and ignores so-called services would be seriously deficient. Mainstream conceptions of industry and services classify economic activities according to the physical properties of their output, and therefore of the specific nature of the tasks, of the concrete labors, that generate it. Services are conventionally defined as weightless, intangible commodities; they cannot be stored and transported and therefore must be consumed in situ and at the moment of their production, as in the case, for instance, of a haircut or a bus journey. Thus, according to The Economist, services are “products of economic activity that you can’t drop on your foot.”64
Yet tangibility is not firm enough to serve as the criterion for dividing industry from services. In the first place, the delivery of the intangible service invariably also involves the consumption of a tangible product of “industry,” as in the scissors used to cut hair or the bus used to transport its passengers. A musical performance cannot be touched, but it does touch the human eardrum by means of a tangible perturbation of the air. Telecommunications are also classified as a service: as with a musical performance, a telephone conversation is consumed at the moment of its delivery and cannot be stored for later use.65 Yet this, too, involves a physical, tangible alteration of matter. Even transportation, also classified as a service, involves a change in the physical location of a product if not in its physical characteristics.
In contrast to the crude physicalist definition, what is critical from a Marxist perspective is not the nature of the specific labor but the social relations of its employment—whether it is employed in the production of commodities or as a personal service, and, if the former, whether the labor is performed in production or in circulation. To develop a valid, concrete and useful concept of the distinction between industry and services it is therefore necessary to consider the distinction between the production of commodities and their circulation.
The Production and Circulation of Commodities
The simplest form of market relation is barter. A barter trade, in which one commodity (for example, a pair of trousers) is exchanged directly for another (for example, a sack of flour), can be expressed by the expression C–C. Assuming equal exchange, C, representing the exchange-value of the commodity, is the same on both sides of the formula. The exchange-value of a commodity is determined not by the subjective desires of the buyers and sellers, as both orthodox and heterodox economic theory maintains,66 but by how much effort it took to make it. If, for example, it takes twice as long to produce a pair of trousers as a sack of flour, then the equilibrium exchange-value of a pair of trousers would be two sacks of flour.
As market relations expand, one commodity becomes the money commodity (usually gold), against which all other commodities are measured. Here, again assuming equal exchange, the formula now becomes C–M–C. In this case, market participants sell something they don’t need in order to buy something they do. Money (M) now intermediates between trouser-sellers and flour-sellers, thanks to which they do not need to meet face-to-face.
Unlike simple commodity producers, who sell in order to buy, merchants buy in order to sell. Their aim is not to acquire something they need, but to acquire money. Their starting and end points begin not with C, but with M. They buy some commodities and then sell them for a higher price. The formula now becomes M–C–M′ where the apostrophe signifies that s/he ends up with more money then s/he started with; in other words M′>M. For this to be so, at least one of these transactions (M–C or C–M′) must be an unequal exchange, a violation of the law of value, in which the merchant takes advantage of surfeits or shortages which cause prices to move away from values.
John Maynard Keynes, who boasted of his ignorance of Marx’s economic theories, commented that:
real exchange relations … bear some resemblance to a pregnant observation by Karl Marx…. He pointed out that the nature of production in the actual world is not, as economists seem often to suppose, a case of C–M–C′, i.e. of exchanging commodity (or effort) for money in order to obtain another commodity (or effort). This may be the standpoint of the private consumer. But it is not the attitude of business, which is a case of M–C–M′, i.e. of parting with money for commodity (or effort) in order to obtain more money.”67
However, in one crucial respect, this garbles Marx’s concept. M–C–M′, as we have seen, describes the behavior of the merchant, who buys and sells C, commodities, in order to increase M, his money, but not the behavior of the capitalist. Whereas small commodity producers sell in order to buy, and merchants buy in order to sell, capitalists buy in order to make. The merchant does not physically alter the commodity that has come into her/his possession (s/he does not in any way produce it). Mercantile capitalism is a primitive form, in which capitalists have yet to separate the producer from the means of production and take possession of the production process. This distinction between simple commodity production and capitalist production, which Keynes omits from his reference to Marx, requires a fundamental modification of the formula expressing the circuit of commodities, which now becomes M–C–C′–M′. Here the merchant has turned into a capitalist. M–C is now the purchase not of commodities for resale, but of “factors of production”: labor-power, means of production, and raw materials. C–C′ is the production process, in which living labor replaces C, its own value and that of materials, etc., used up in production, and generates a surplus value (the difference between C and C′). The time spent by living labor producing this surplus value Marx called surplus labor. This surplus labor is the source and substance not only of profit in all its forms, but of capital itself, which is nothing but accumulated surplus labor. Marx commented, “The production process [C–C′] appears simply as an unavoidable middle term, a necessary evil for the purpose of money-making.”68
In this schema, value production takes place only in C–C′; the other two links, M–C and C′–M′, encompass the circulation of these values, the exchange of titles of ownership. Whether or not a task or link in a value chain is productive of value depends not on the specific nature of this particular task or link, but where in the circuit of capital it is situated. This forms the foundation for Marx’s theory of productive and non-productive labor.
Productive and Non-Productive Labor
As with our earlier discussion of different ways to measure the magnitude of outsourcing, what is of fundamental importance is not the physical properties of the commodities being produced but the social relations of their production. And more important than the largely spurious distinction between services and industry is another that is often confused with it—the one between productive and non-productive labor. As Anwar Shaikh and E. Ahmet Tonak have pointed out, “The very term ‘services’ conflates a vital distinction between production and nonproduction labor.”69 This question is of great relevance to our investigation into labor productivity and the “GDP illusion,” and to the development of a theory of the imperialist form of the value relation. Its introduction at this point is necessary in order to liberate our concepts of industry and services from the vulgar physicalist approach that dominates mainstream conceptions and has contaminated Marxist approaches.70
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