The rising share of value created in the so-called ‘non-core’

Although we have established that the labour of a worker can no longer be considered to be productive in the individual sense, it is nevertheless worth undertaking a further level of abstraction to try and break down the share of surplus value that different types of workers contribute to the final commodity and, more importantly, to the whole mass of commodities in the current phase of capitalist production. The value of a commodity, for Marx (1990), is equal to the socially necessary labour time that is crystallised in it. During the era of craft work, a skilled craft worker would spend an awful lot of labour time to produce a single product. Their labour would, therefore, contribute a large share of the value in the final commodity. The

auxiliary worker who would move the finished products from the craft work station and prepare them for sale, would spend far less labour time working with each product than the craft worker. Their labour would, as a result, only contribute a tiny fraction of the value in a given commodity. We can, therefore, conclude that the labour of craft workers may have been central to the production of surplus value for capital. But the craft worker has been eliminated from modern industry. Today it is the machine operator that sits at the centre of production. It is easy to assume, simply by noting their location in the production process, that these workers continue to be the main source of surplus value for capital. But is this really the case?

The mechanisation or automation of work on production lines exponentially increases the productivity and intensity of the labour of workers located in production – especially the machine operators. It is true, therefore, that the labour of the machine operator can generate higher rates of relative surplus value for capital, but only for a given period of time. Once these technological advances are equalised across an industry, the advantages in the productivity and intensity of labour which had increased the rate of relative surplus value are lost (see 2.1.5). When this transpires, the socially necessary labour time required to create each commodity falls and, therefore, the labour of the machine operator contributes less fresh value to each individual commodity than it did before the new technology was introduced.2 On the other

hand, one could argue that the labour of the forklift driver, for example, continues to contribute the same amount fresh value to the final commodity as before – considering that the speed and carrying capacity of forklifts has remained relatively stable over time. This is because they still spend the same amount of socially necessary labour time to transport each pallet from the production line to the warehouse. If the automation of production work means that the labour of machine operators contributes less value to the individual commodity once the newer machinery equalises across an industry, and the labour of the forklift driver contributes the same amount of value as before, then we can argue that the share of value contributed by the forklift driver to the individual commodity rises in proportion to the falling share contributed by the machine operator.

More importantly, the introduction of new machinery on production lines generally comes with retrenchments of production workers. This means that once the technology equalises across the

industry, the collective labours of production workers contribute less surplus value to the total mass of commodities. At the same time, the increased levels of production that comes with automation of the production line requires capital to employ more forklift drivers to prevent bottlenecks, since one driver can only transport a finite number of pallets each day. As a result, the labour of forklift drivers will not only contribute a higher share of the surplus value in the individual commodity, but collectively their labour will contribute a greater share of the surplus value in the total mass of commodities.

This abstraction is built upon the assumption that the automation of production work outstrips the automation of work in auxiliary functions like forklift driving. Capital, of course, will look to automate wherever it is profitable to do so. At Pioneer and Simba we have witnessed the automation of the auxiliary work of packing and palletising at the end of production lines (see 4.3.1 and 4.4.2). But it is always easier to automate closer to the production lines. The cost of automating warehouse work (as Amazon has done in the US using robots and surveillance technology (see Chen, 2019; Evans, 2019)) is not cost effective in countries with large reserves of cheap labour. As the above findings demonstrate, the industrial workplace in South Africa today is generally still characterised by large numbers of auxiliary workers both inside production and in the other functions of the labour process (almost always under precarious forms of employment) and a smaller number of workers who operate the machines that actually make the products (often also precarious workers but still in many cases permanent workers). We can, therefore, assert that the share of value contributed by the former (i.e. workers in auxiliary positions) is crucial to the profits of the manufacturing company in the current phase of capitalist production. So, to continue to refer to these workers as ‘non-core’ is, at the very least, analytically unhelpful.