> Yoshie:
> > Among the overlapping categories that [WS] listed, the only sector
> > that's relatively well organized in America are government
> > employees. According to the BLS, "About 36 percent of government
> > workers were union members in 2004, compared with about 8 percent of
> > workers in private-sector industries" (at <http://www.bls.gov/
> > news.release/union2.nr0.htm>). That is a huge gap. When the only
> > stronghold of organized labor becomes workers whose wages and
> > benefits directly depend on tax dollars, which in turn depend on
> > profits produced by the work of unorganized workers, organized labor
> > has a big political and economic problem at hand.
>
> yes, it's a problem, but I think it's a mistake to call them
> "unproductive." They are directly unproductive in that they don't
> contribute directly to individual capitalist profits, but they are
> indirectly productive, in that they help the capitalist class as a
> whole.
Wojtek writes:
> Calling government workers unproductive is an invective straight
> out of the neo-liberal propaganda handbook, and if I were to name
> only one thing in the world "bullshit" that would be on a very
> short list.
You have to look at "productive" and "unproductive" activities without taking on a moralist outlook.
Private sector workers' wages and benefits are paid out of profits that they create. Public sector workers' wages and benefits are also paid out of the same source: profits that private sector workers create (excepting public sector workers employed in state enterprises that operate for profit or at least break even based solely on revenues from goods or services they sell).
Jim says that public sector workers contribute indirectly to the profits of the capitalist class as a whole, but that's only true for some of the public sector workers' activities -- parts of education and transportation, for instance -- that go into creating and maintaining conditions for accumulation. Running a giant military, a huge prison system, etc. -- thousands of times larger than minimal necessity to create and maintain a secure business environment -- doesn't even indirectly contribute to accumulation: that's a straight debit.
I don't believe that there is a clearly identifiable limit to the growth of public sector workforce in a capitalist economy. The size of public sector workforce that a capitalist economy can comfortably maintain depends on a lot of factors, like productivity of private sector workers, extents to which public sector workers are engaged in activities that indirectly contribute to accumulation rather than simply consuming surplus, the state's ability and willingness to tax, who gets taxed, etc.
At worst, an imbalance creates a problem like what Aristide faced in Haiti: a state, unable to tax, totally dependent on foreign aid to pay for public sector workers and therefore absolutely vulnerable to withdrawal of foreign aid and instabilities that the withdrawal begets . . . finished off by a subsequent coup.
At best, an imbalance contributes to the growth of massive public debt: the capitalist class gets tax cuts and pass the tax burden to workers while investing more overseas, but workers, themselves borrowing heavily to finance their own consumption, can't bear all of the buck passed to them, so the government borrows heavily while cutting social programs and/or public sector workers' wages and benefits.
Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>