Part IV: Communist Education

Soviet Education's Unsolved Problems
Communist Schooling
Education, Employment, and Development in Communist Societies
The Economics of Education
Financing Elementary and Secondary Schools in the Soviet Union
The 'Unproductives' Labor of Soviet Teachers
China's Vocational and Technicial Training

Source: Harold J. Noah, "The 'Unproductive'
 Labour of Soviet Teachers," Soviet Studies 
17:2 (1965), pp. 238-244.  Reprinted by permission.

THE 'UNPRODUCTIVE' LABOR OF SOVIET TEACHERS^*

According to the rules of Soviet economic accounting, the aggregate social product is produced in the material-production sector of the economy only. This sector embraces principally industry, agriculture, construction, goods-transport, that fraction of communications which serves production, material-technical supply, trade and public catering. Only labour which is engaged in these spheres of work is termed productive, that is, is said to produce a fund of value out of which its remuneration can be paid. Labour employed in other sectors (mainly service-occupations, such as state administration, medicine, education and culture, and general public service) is termed 'socially useful', but not 'productive'.¹ The income which this labour receives is not regarded as part of the aggregate social product, and therefore does not form part of the national income. It follows that while the work of the teacher is recognized as being socially useful, it is nevertheless termed 'unproductive'. Incomes derived from teaching are regarded as transfer payments, which are drawn from the national income and do not yield a balancing flow of wealth out of which teachers' pay is covered.²

Soviet authorities generally insist that this categorization is founded on Marx's own teaching and is therefore of impeccable doctrinal origin.³ How far is this true?

Marx deals specifically with the services of teachers in a passage commenting on Adam Smith's concept of productive and unproductive labour:

... the purchase takes place of such services as train, modify, maintain, etc. labour power ... as for example the service of the school-master, in so far as it is 'industrially necessary', or useful.... These are therefore services which put in their place 'a vendible commodity', etc., namely labour power itself, into whose cost of production and reproduction these services enter.⁴

There seems to be little doubt that Marx regards the teacher's services, in so far as [they are] "industrially necessary" or useful', as productive. Certainly he does not seem to consider the money spent in purchasing such services as mere transfer payments, for he is definite that they '...are therefore services which put in their place "a vendible commodity"'. So far, then, the weight of Marx's authority appears to be against current Soviet practice.

Even though Marx goes on to modify his position in two further statements, the first modification is not now applicable to modern industrial societies and the second lacks conviction. In his first modification, Marx implies that we can neglect the costs of education as insignificant. He says: 'However, Adam Smith knew how little "education" enters in the costs of production of the mass of workers'.⁵ While this may certainly have been true of the largely unschooled labour force of eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain, it is hardly true of the Soviet Union today.⁶ After allowing for the 'consumption' elements in the expenditures, a goodly share of the costs of education and training do now 'enter into the costs of production of the mass of workers'.

Marx's second point of modification runs as follows:

Let us assume that wages and profit simultaneously decline in total value, whatever the cause -- for example, because the nation has become lazier -- and at the same time fall as measured in use value, because labour has become less productive owing to a bad harvest, etc.; in short, that the part of the product whose value is equivalent to revenue declines, because less new labour has been applied in the past year and because the labour that was applied has been less productive. If then capitalists and workers want to consume the same sum of value in material things as they did before, they would be able to buy less of the services of the doctor, schoolmaster, etc. And if they were compelled to continue the same outlay on both, then they would have to restrict their consumption of other things. It is therefore clear that the labours of the doctor and the schoolmaster do not directly create the fund out of which they are paid, although their labours enter into the costs of production of the fund which creates all values whatsoever -- the costs of production of labour power.⁷

There is negligible merit in this argument for it can be switched too easily the other way to show just the converse. For example, what if schoolmasters produce less, perhaps because they become lazier, and the capitalists and workers want to consume the same sum of value in teaching services as before? They will be able to buy less of the output of the farmer, the steel-maker, and so forth. And if they feel obliged to maintain their outlays on education, 'they would have to restrict their consumption of other things'. But this does not prove that only the services provided by teachers 'directly create the fund out of which they are paid', any more than Marx's argument demonstrates the converse.

In fact Marx himself immediately thereafter abandons any qualifications of this kind and proceeds to clinch the case for his original contention that expenses of education are (logically) 'productive' expenditures:

Is not the value of the commodities to be found at any time on the market greater as a result of the 'unproductive labour' than it would be without this labour? Are not there at every moment on the market, alongside wheat and meat and so on, also prostitutes, lawyers, sermons, concerts, theatrical performances, soldiers, politicians, etc.? These lads and wenches do not get the 'corn and other necessaries' for nothing. in return they give or pester us with their services, which as such services have a use value, and because of their production costs have also an exchange value. Reckoned as consumable articles in the form of commodities, there is a quantity of articles consumable as services. The total amount of consumable articles is thus at every moment greater than it would be without the consumable services. Secondly, however, the value is also greater; for it is equal to the value of the commodities which are paid for these services, and the latter is equal to the value of the services themselves.⁸

It would be difficult to imagine a more explicit rejection of the present Soviet position which regards incomes earned in teaching as transfer payments. Concluding his lengthy analysis of Smith's position, Marx states that in capitalist society productive labour is best considered as merely that labour which produces additional capital for the capitalist:

Only labour which is directly transformed into capital is productive; that is,.... Labour which creates a surplus value or serves capital as a means to the creation of surplus value, and hence as a means through which capital becomes capital, value which produces more value.⁹

What the Soviets have done is to take this analysis which was specifically designed to fit capitalist society and apply it to a socialist society, in which hardly any labour is supposed to be engaged in the creation of surplus value for private appropriation. It is true that in some places Marx does appear to support the present Soviet contention that 'the aggregate social product is created only in the material production sector'.¹⁰For example, he says:

It can then be said to be a characteristic of productive workers, that is, of capital-producing workers, that their labour is realized in commodities, in material wealth.'¹¹

But examination of the context again reveals that Marx was here analyzing the modus operandi of a developing capitalist economy in which non-capitalist (domestic or peasant) manufacture and agriculture were being rapidly eliminated. He judges that there will be a coincidence of the sphere of capitalist production with the sphere of material production, because that is the way capitalism develops. Therefore in the sphere of capitalist production, where it so happens that material commodities are produced, surplus value is appropriated by capitalists and workers in that sphere are 'productive'. The implied corollary is that the sphere of non-material production (service-production) remains in the hands of individuals or non-capitalist organizers. In such economic conditions there is no automatic appropriation of surplus value, and in consequence labour in that sphere is termed 'unproductive'.

It is indeed ironic that Marx, of all political economists, should be so misunderstood by the Soviet economists. For he was the social critic who above all others insisted that his terms and constructs could be properly understood and applied only in the context of the special set of productive relations for which they were developed. For example, he was at pains to emphasize that a central concept, like 'surplus value', retained a constant meaning only within the framework of a given set of production relations. Thus, says Marx, if I employ independent handicraftsman to repaper my house, 'they belong neither to the category of productive nor to that of unproductive workers, although they are producers of commodities ... their production does not fall under the capitalist mode of production'.¹²He goes on to point out that, even if we do regard the independent handicraftsman or peasant as producing surplus value, he does so by virtue solely of his ownership of the capital with which he works. That is, the capital (which he owns himself) may be regarded as hiring the labour (his own labour power), and as a capitalist he appropriates the surplus value which he produced as a worker.

Marx was adamant that the 'material nature' of the product which the worker was directly or indirectly concerned in producing had no straightforward bearing on his 'productive' or 'unproductive' labelling. Thus:

The determinate material form of the labour, and consequently of its product, in itself has nothing whatever to do with the distinction between productive and unproductive labour. For example, the cooks and waiters in a public hotel are productive workers, in so far as their labour is transformed into capital for the proprietor of the hotel .... ¹³

In fact, Soviet statisticians do include 'public catering' in the material-production sector. But Marx goes on to make the same point on behalf of other workers whom the Soviet economists insist on regarding as socially-useful, but definitely 'unproductive'.

... an entrepreneur of theatres, concerts, brothels, etc. buys the temporary disposal over the labour power of actors, musicians, prostitutes, etc.... the sale of [their services] to the public provides him with wages and profit.... In short, the production of these services can be in part subordinated to capital, (just as a part of the labour which embodies itself in useful things is bought directly from revenue and is not subordinated to capitalist production).¹⁴

Marx is repetitive to the point of boredom in his insistence that those who render services unconnected with the production of material goods may nevertheless, in capitalist conditions, be classified as 'productive' workers. One final quotation must suffice:

What is 'unproductive labour' is absolutely defined. It is labour which is not exchanged against capital, but directly against revenue, that is against wages or profit.... An actor, for example, or even a clown, according to this definition is a productive worker, if he works in the employ of a capitalist to whom he returns more labour than he receives from him in the form of wages ....¹⁵

Very little of this analysis is applicable to the socialist society of the present-day Soviet Union. Yet most Soviet economists are seemingly content to accept the definition of productive labour as labour which is engaged in the material-goods sector of the economy, and which alone produces the aggregate social product. And mistakenly they consider that they are supported by the authority of Marx himself.

Some economists in the Soviet Union have expressed their dissatisfaction with the categories at present applied. Ya. Kronrod sees the points made above, but only to reject them.¹⁶ He refers to 'those Soviet economists, who insist that in the USSR there is no place for differentiation between productive and unproductive labour'.¹⁷ He believes they are mistaken. But having once seen the problem, he cannot ignore it. His way out is to change the terms:

The terms 'productive' and 'unproductive' labour are unsuitable ... under socialism. In Marxian political economy, they are used to express not only material content, but also the social character of labour in capitalist society ... showing the exploitative and antagonistic position of unproductive labour... under socialism, the two types of labour are united, as parts of social labour... it would be expedient to use the terms: 'material-producing labour' . [and] 'socially-useful non-productive labour'.¹⁸

But none of this helps very much in the border line problems raised by the work of artists, writers, and sculptors, let alone by the work of teachers whose pupils will eventually use their education and training to help produce goods and services.

V.E. Komarov, who has written incisively on the economics of Soviet education,¹⁹has also pointed out the contradiction between Marx's teaching and Soviet practice,²⁰ but he stops short of proposing a formal reclassification of expenditures for education. It has been left to S. G. Strumilin to argue that a socialist society should abandon the unproductive notions of 'productive' and 'unproductive' labour, which of themselves give rise to absurdities in social accounting.²¹

It remains to enquire why the Soviets have clung so slavishly to what is, after all, a misinterpretation of Marx's teaching. V. Holesovsky concluded his important article on this topic with the assertion that there is probably no good reason why the Soviet national income concept has been drawn so narrowly, and that all we shall probably be able to say is that 'the material output concept won out because of the political survival and ascendancy of those who held it, rather than because of any intrinsic suitability of the concept'. This, of course, takes us very little further, if only because it raises the even more difficult question of why those who held this doctrine did survive, and the others did not. But, in any case, it is possible to rely upon an analysis entirely free from arguments ad hominem. There seem to be at least three objective considerations urging the Soviets toward the interpretation they have adopted.

First, the Soviet planners have been particularly concerned with building the material base of the economy. The adoption of the material output concept 'was in keeping with the overwhelming emphasis of past economic policy [in the USSR] on expanding capacity for material production'.²² Rightly or wrongly, many of the planners and policymakers felt that this position provided the correct basis for encouraging economic growth under socialism.²³

Second, national income statistics have never played the important role in Soviet-type planning that they have in western-style 'guidance' of the economy. The Soviets have operated much more in terms of material-balances, labour-balances, and the like. There has been an over-riding concern with the rapid achievement of preestablished physical production targets. If this has often led to inflationary pressures, the Soviet instinct was not to abandon physical-planning-by-balances in order to follow equilibrium national income policies, but to push ahead in the knowledge that inflation and its consequences were the lesser rather than the greater part of the burdens the Soviet people were to be called upon to bear. National income accounting along western lines simply did not seem to be operationally significant to those engaged in 'reaching and overtaking the most advanced capitalist countries'.

Third, the volume of non-material production has not been very large, nor probably has it been growing much more rapidly than the economy as a whole. It is especially interesting to note that since 1952 growth of employment in education and culture (prosveshcheniye) appears to have been slower than growth of employment in the total economy,²⁴although, of late, employment in the 'unproductive' branches of the Soviet economy has been growing somewhat faster than employment as a whole.²⁵ Omission of the output of the main service occupations from the aggregate social product in the USSR is not therefore quite so heinous a statistical affront as it would be in a country with more developed tertiary occupations.

In conclusion, it is worth noting that within the announced framework of Marxist-Leninist theory, the room for manoeuvre has been quite considerable, on large matters as well as small. For 40 years, and until recently, the narrow material output concept of national income accounting has proved to be little hindrance to the basic development of the economy, and perhaps even a help by concentrating attention on the output of a fairly limited number of key items. As the economy develops in complexity, as a larger fraction of the employed population finds work in the so-called 'unproductive' sectors, and as the over-riding planning priorities are no longer automatically awarded to the material base of the economy, we may well witness changes in the national income definitions. Moreover, the accepted Marxist-Leninist categories are probably flexible enough to be able to contain even quite fundamental changes within their ample limits.

NOTES

* I wish to acknowledge my debts, first, to Professor Alexander Erlich, Columbia University, who commented on the first draft of this article; and, second, to V. Holesovsky, whose article, 'Marx and National Income Theory', The American Economic Review, June 1961, demonstrated some of the ways in which Soviet theoreticians err in believing that they are following Marx in adopting a narrow material-output concept of the aggregate social product. The present paper retraces some of this material. [BACK]

1. See, for example, Kratki ekonomicheski slovar (Moscow, 1958) p. 266; and Politicheskaya ekonomiya-uchebnik, ed. 3rd. (Moscow, 1959) p. 631. [BACK]

2. Kratki ekonomicheski slovar', op. cit., pp. 195-6. [BACK]

3. See, for example, M. Z. Bor, Natsionalny dokhod sotsialisticheskovo obshchestva (Moscow, 1957) pp. 6-7. [BACK]

4. K. Marx, Theories of Surplus Value (New York, 1952), p.164. [BACK]

5. Ibid. p. 165. [BACK]

6. In 1962 the state budget of the USSR provided for expenditures of nearly nine milliard rubles for public education and training. This sum represented about 11% of total state budget expenditures. Narodnoye khozyaistvo SSSR v 1962 godu (Moscow, 1963) pp. 635, 637-8. [BACK]

7. Marx, op. cit. [BACK]

8. Marx, op. cit. p. 166. [BACK]

9. Marx, op. cit. p. 178. Marx's emphasis. [BACK]

10. Politicheskaya ekonomiya, op. cit. p. 631. [BACK]

11. Marx, op. cit. p. 194. [BACK]

12. Marx, op. cit. p. 192. [BACK]

13. Marx, op. cit. p. 155. [BACK]

14. Ibid. pp. 163-4. [BACK]

15. Marx, op. cit. p. 153. [BACK]

16. Thus, '. . . although in socialist society, the aggregate labour of all its members is useful and necessary, whether they work in material or non-material production, or whether they serve immediate consumption, nevertheless this in no way allows us to equate all types of activity assuming that all create a product, i.e., that everybody takes part in production and is occupied with productive labour'. Ya. A. Kronrod, Sotsialisticheskoye vosproizvodstvo (Moscow, 1955) p. 142. [BACK]

17. Kronrod, op. cit. [BACK]

18. Kronrod, op. cit. pp. 145-6. [BACK]

19. See, for example, his article 'Ekonomicheskiye problemy vosproizvodstva kvalifitsirovannykh spetsialistov', in Kronrod and Shamberg (eds.), Problemy politicheskoi ekonomii sotsializma (Moscow, 1959); and his Ekonomicheskiye osnovy podgotovki spetsialistov, dlya narodnovo khozyaistva (Moscow, 1959). [BACK]

20. Komarov, 'Ekonomicheskiye problemy . . .', op. cit. p. 151. [BACK]

21. S. G. Strumilin, 'K otsenke darovykh blag prirody', in his Statistiko-ekonomicheskiye ocherki (Moscow, 1958). [BACK]

22. United Nations Economic Bulletin for Europe, 11:3 (Geneva, 1959) p. 53 ff. [BACK]

23. Thus, M. Z. Bor comments typically: 'The correct sub-division of the entire aggregate social product of labour into socially-necessary labour engaged in the productive sphere and socially-necessary labour engaged in the non-productive sphere possesses vast practical significance in securing high rates of development of material production, and the proportionality of the socialist economy'. Natsionalny dokhod . . ., op. cit. pp. 5-6. [BACK]

24. Narkhoz 1962, p. 455. [BACK]

25. Ibid. p. 451. [BACK]