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Labour versus Labour
Echelons of labour in the production process are investigated. There is labour directed at the flow of output. Unproductive work also exists. It is concluded that the government expenditure supports production, and the taxation of unearned incomes should be 100%.
To emphasise, this article is not about capital versus labour. Thus, concepts like the rate of exploitation are not in question. All that is retained of the classic conflict is the backdrop in the sense of cooperation under conditions of non-cooperation in the interest of efficient production in what might be called the “neo-feudal” mode of capitalist production by Kenneth Binmore (Miller 2022).
Capitalists, by definition, own and lease or supply land, plant, and machines to the production managers of firms. Our focus is intra-firm tensions between levels of employment as well as extra-firm pulls and pushes between the wage earned from producing the goods and services inside and the returns promised by the financial circuit outside. To take one example, workers are rentiers. They hold shares of companies. Besides, the distinction between banks and financial institutions is blurred and they are persuaded to turn their saving deposits into mutual funds. The working class is not homogeneous. When moving up the corporate ladder, tastes get refined, moving from plain vanilla to exotic instruments. Indeed, workers might counterpoise the precariousness of work with the risk/return from financial instruments.
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