Brexit Britain's Bridge To Nowhere - Part 21 of 27

The relocation of large amounts of industrial production met the needs of the global ruling class owners of fictitious capital, because, as a global class, they can own fictitious-capital as easily in South Korea as in South Kensington. The higher profits of capital in these industrialising economies made possible higher revenues for them in interest/dividends. But, also, in the developed economies, as they expanded, after 1999, this expansion did not bring the same rapid increase in demands for capital and labour, as occurred in the past, for the simple reason that a large part of the labour-intensive production, now, took place elsewhere.

In the NIC's, global capital now found its manufacturing labour from vast reserves of peasant and other rural labour, as it had done in Europe, in the 18th and 19th century. By contrast, in developed economies, particularly Britain and the US, large numbers of former manufacturing workers moved in the opposite direction, becoming the modern equivalent of the peasants and precarious labourers of pre-industrial times, i.e. they became impoverished petty-bourgeois, and precarious, sweated labour, or in places, in the decayed urban towns, the equivalent of the serfs and paupers, now dependent on a paternalistic, welfare state. It did not put upward pressure on wages, because these were not wage workers. (See here).

But, this type of petty-bourgeois production, like peasant production, is inevitably inefficient. It explains why the productivity of these economies, overall, during this period, has been low. The other change and consequence, during that period, as I set out in my book, is that large numbers of workers became employed as commercial workers. Part of the new international division of labour, created from the 1980's, was that surplus value was produced in the NIC's, but a large part of it was realised, by commercial capital in the developed economies of Europe and North America, emphasising the integral nature of industrial capital – containing both productive capital and commercial capital/capital in circulation – as, now, a global phenomenon – globalisation.

In Capital III, Chapter 17, Marx notes that capital increases the amount of productive labour employed as much as it can, because this is the source of surplus value, but it only increases the amount of commercial labour employed, as much as it needs to, because this labour does not create surplus value, but only realises it.

The amount of commercial labour required is not determined by the value of commodities to be circulated, but by their quantity. It takes no more commercial workers to sell a £200,000 Bentley than for a £20,000 Ford, for example. But, if 10 Fords are sold for every Bentley, approximately ten times as many commercial workers are required, allowing for economies of scale. And, of course, this commercial capital/capital in circulation, that comprises an integral part of the circuit of industrial capital, does not involve just the end salesperson, but also all of those workers involved in wholesaling, logistics, and money-dealing, as well as all of the bookkeepers and so on.

What characterised this period, since the 1970's, was the huge rise in the quantity of production, and the range of products available to be sold. As I have set out, elsewhere, of all the goods and services produced in human history, nearly 25% were produced in the first decade of this century alone. So, this vast increase in the quantity of use-values to be circulated was, also, the basis of a large increase in the number of commercial workers.

Its not just that this huge rise in productivity, resulting from the microchip revolution, massively reduced the unit value of existing commodities, meaning a greater quantity of them could be bought and consumed, but that entirely new types of commodity were produced and consumed – pocket calculators, video recorders, cassette tape players, photocopiers, video game machines, personal computers, CD players, mobile phones, to name just a few – all of which required new commercial outlets, and, at first, specialist sales staff.

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