From his false claims in relation to productive labour, and labour that is productive of new value, Roberts goes on to another false conclusion.
“State employees, teachers, social workers, health workers are unproductive for capitalism, as they do not deliver new value and surplus value for capital - indeed their wages are a deduction from overall surplus value. That partly explains why capital is so opposed to state spending and investment and in favour of privatisation.”
Not only is this false, but it has thoroughly reactionary implications. Given Roberts history as a leading member of the Militant Tendency, whose Fabian politics fetishised the role of the capitalist state, in the form of their reformist, statist demands for it to “nationalise the 200 top monopolies”, its hard to know whether the vulgar politics flowed from the vulgar economic theory or vice versa. It represents the thoroughly fallacious view that the state is, of itself, in some way “socialist”, irrespective of the class nature of that state!
Firstly, as set out above, it is not true that state employees do not create new value. If they did not, then there would be no basis for them being paid wages for the labour they undertake. Its true that not all, state employees create new value, but only to the same extent that not all employees of any other capital, create new value. In those cases, as Marx describes, the basis of their payment is that the labour is necessary for the realisation of value, rather than its creation. But, it is clearly not true to say that the labour of a teacher, or a doctor, or a train driver employed by the state is not productive of new value.
Moreover, it is, also, not true to say that, just because a teacher or doctor, or a train driver is employed by the state capital, rather than a private capital, that they are not productive of surplus value either, and for the same reason. The teacher is paid wages equal to the value of their labour-power, but the new value they create is greater than that value of their labour-power, whether employed by the state or by Eton! As Marx and Engels put it,
“The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with.”
(Anti-Duhring, p 360)
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