The notion of SLP is based on the assumption that all saving of social labour is useful, and vice versa. Therefore, this indicator may be used to optimize the work of various services, to assess the efficiency of administration, the reliability of public transport; to adjust the salaries of various categories of workers, etc. For example, is a train carrying 1,000 passengers is half an hour late, is there an excuse for the circumstances that caused the loss of 500 pers./h of social labour? If production increase does not entail SLP increase, then production rates should be slowed down. If reorganisations, measures and reforms implemented cause SLP to drop, they are, without any doubt, too aggressive. If a nanny at the kindergarten helps save the efforts of dozens of parents, this is her actual labour productivity. And this has nothing to do with the work force cost, as it does now.
Another example: today advertising consumes the time of millions of people, as well as enormous material resources amounts, while it generates profit for an insignificant number of businessmen who want to sell their products, often foreign-made. Similarly, traffic congestions take huge time, increase the fuel consumption, and accelerate destruction of roads and vehicles. Besides, they increase the demand for these commodities, and by consequence – the income of certain individuals and the tax revenue for the budget. Products of low-quality foods and counterfeit drugs kills people, but then it also helps boost the income of their producers. Consumption of tobacco and alcohol ruins the nations’ health; however, it increases the profitability of their manufacturers, excise tax revenues for the state, etc.
1.3.3. SLP suppressing factors
The accelerating decrease in the social labour productivity in most countries as “world civilisation’ develops and establishes there, despite considerable scientific and technological progress, indicates the existence of some underlying phenomena that actively counteract progress. What are they?
In order to understand this situation, let us turn back to the labour differentiation scheme presented in Figure 1. Why does the performance of this industrial relations mechanism continuously get worse? What prevents this system from being properly efficient? What are the main drawbacks of the current economic doctrine, why is its ideology deformed?
This issue is difficult to understand not only because of its multifaceted nature, but also because its causes and consequences have intertwined into such a tight knot that untying it turns out extremely complicated. Moreover, should we even try to do that? To find out, let us start by drawing a simple list of the key SLP suppressing factors.
As it has already been mentioned, none of the structures present in Figure 1 is self-sufficient, and only united they have force. Nevertheless, the current economic model does not provide a clear order for distribution of jointly produced income, which further complicates the work of the forces that bind these structures together. Administration has failed to manage it, and the present-day monetary mechanism aimed at executing this function works poorly in the current conditions (for more details, see Subsection 3.2.2).
For this reason, each of the economic sectors pursues its proper interests, and does not care for the common benefit. This breaks the coordination of actions, and constructive cooperation is replaced by destructive competition. The desire to appropriate the bigger part of public income overpowers the task of increasing its aggregate value. Modern experts in the sphere of finance, energetics, trade, housing and utilities and others, with their absolute lack of restraint, are a vivid example of this tendency. For instance, the share of energy-related expenditures in the Russian enterprises price structure has already exceeded 50%, which does not correspond to the number of work force employed in the sector and, therefore, undermines the competitiveness of national economics.
If across the world the correlation between the income of producers and trade in the prices of items is about 70% to 30%, in Russia this proportion has literally been reversed. The profit from management, trade, and credit and financial services has become incommensurably higher than the income of science, education, awareness, light industries, or healthcare. It would be erroneous to assume that the most prosperous economic sectors employ the most intelligent, hardworking, experienced and qualified people. Besides, it seems too naïve to believe that such system better stimulates real values production.
Furthermore, the result of such confrontation is easily predictable. Russian fable writer I. A. Krylov described this situation in his fable: “A Crawfish, Swan and Pike combining | resolved to draw a cart and freight… However much they work, the load to stir refuses. | It seems to be perverse with selfwill vast endowed; | The swan makes upward for a cloud. | The crayfish falls behind, the pike the river uses…’. That is why “… the cart remains there, still’41. However, the ideologists of modern economics seem to be completely unaware of this; at least, they do their best to ignore the problem.
Another global factor suppressing SLP is the actual lack of interest on the part of all economic structures in seeing real (non-monetary) results of their activities. This applies not only to wage workers and administrators, but also to politicians and businessmen. The actual result of their work is concealed by financial success, personal benefits, fixed salary, profit, preferences, which belong to a different category. That is why the existing incentives for work organisation often fail to help social production to flourish, moreover, they end up suppressing and degrading it.
Indeed, money as a purpose of economic activity does not constitute a real value; it is nothing but a trade instrument. It is a generally accepted equivalent for exchange of commodities, a social convention, artificially enabled to substitute real goods. Unless backed by real things, money is empty, and at present no backing is provided for it. That is why the general acceptance of such “conventions’ cannot contribute to actual prosperity. For instance, various forms of rent, racketeering, crime, corruption, inflation, drugs, etc. generate significant income for some people, but is far from benefiting the society in general, rather, they destroy it.
Huge losses are also born by the humanity as the result of disharmony between production and Nature, i.e. as the result of the desire to use up the natural rent, to make momentary profit without taking global consequences into account. As the result, modern expanded production is by no means expanded. On the contrary, it shapes vital activity by way of destroying its very foundation, i.e. natural habitat. Thus, for the past several decades we have shamelessly live at the expense of Nature, squandering, like thoughtless barbarians, the wealth it has accumulated over millions of years. We now live at the cost of future generations.
Therefore, if the natural mark-up is included in the cost price of products, the profitability of the major part of modern enterprises will be negative! To quote an example, in order to return the Volga river to its pre-industrial state, to restore fisheries and farmed lands, to rebuild the houses and the infrastructure of all submerged territories, much more energy would be required than has been generated by the hydropower plants constructed on the river. One might wonder: what kind of economics are we dealing with, and what is the actual efficiency of its production relations?
And still, one of the most powerful influences on the structure, the ideology, and the very lifestyle of the society is exerted by exploitation, i.e. by unequal exchange of products of labour between economic actors and individuals. Born as simple cannibalism, this phenomenon has by now acquired most sophisticated forms; it is not only revered, it is universally desired. The market itself, in its current form, fully connives in this. As the result, a capitalist system has evolved, within which poverty is strongly tied to the excessive wealth of certain individuals.
The extent of exploitation is truly planetary, this phenomenon knows no borders. One finds it in the way economic structures and the state itself are organized, and in the ways the ruling elites are selected. It is behind the destructive wars, which break out or smoulder across the globe; behind the suicidal