A top manager is such a concrete example, on which Marxists most often stumble in attempts of social classification, in search of the proletariat. On the one hand, he is without a doubt a wage-laborer, which means the proletarian according to Engelsi, and on the other, an obvious exploiter, unworthy of the high rank of the proletariat and even the worker. Therefore, it is worth understanding this subject from the very beginning.

1. Definition of labor and subject of labor

Labor in its original, narrowest and deepest meaning is a special expedient human activity to adapt the substance of nature to a specific human need. The roots of labor go beyond the horizon of human existence as a species. And for many millennia, labor was only a direct exchange of substances between man and nature, only a physical effect on the subject of labor: land, plants, animals, stone, wood, bone – a poor set of accessible environmental objects.

With the development of production, more and more objects of labor were involved in the sphere of human activity, technologies became more complicated, the process of division of labor began. In addition to the technological division of labor by occupation, professions and crafts, a special area of people management has been singled out. According to the expression of Marx: “All combined labour on a large scale requires, more or less, a directing authority, in order to secure the harmonious working of the individual activities, and to perform the general functions that have their origin in the action of the combined organism, as distinguished from the action of its separate organs”i. Can management be considered as labor? Of course, this activity is necessary for the production of human livelihoods. Therefore, the definition of labor also develops at this stage into a broader concept:

Labor is in the broad sense any useful activity.

A useful activity is defined as a socially useful activity. If a bandit robbed a passerby, it may be useful to him to some extent, but it is certainly not a labor.

In the further process of developing of human society and increasing of its labor productivity, another form of activity is singled out – mental labor, activity in the sphere of ideas. It also becomes a necessary element in the system of social production. Science, education, culture, art provide social progress, and large groups of people are fully committed to these activities. Their work, mediated through the chain of labor of other people, in the end is also embodied in material objects that serve to the certain human needs.

So, we examined the emergence of three forms of human activity or labor in the broad sense in relation to objects of labor:

• labor directly transforming matter and energy or moving them – this is labor in the narrow sense or productive labor;
• labor aimed at people – management, education, medicine, services – labor in the broad sense;
• labor aimed at the production of ideas is science and art, it is also included in the definition of labor in the broad sense.

The last two activities are also called unproductive labor. Not in order to belittle these activities, but on a deep philosophical basis of the primacy of matter and the secondary nature of human consciousness.

Let us further consider the movement of material production itself. Man first produces the products of his consumption. Starting from a primitive society and up to feudal subsistence farming, the clan first, then the tribe, and subsequently the peasant community provided itself with all the necessary means of life. But gradually, with the deepening division of labor, an increasing number of manufactured products became commodities and were no longer produced for personal consumption, but for exchange for other products.

When the time came for universal commodity production, that is, capitalism, almost all the products of labor went to the market. In particular, labor has become a market commodity. The worker at the factory began to produce not goods and not a product for his own consumption. Its main purpose was the performance of individual production operations. The employee is alienated from the product of labor and transformed into a partial employee.

A product for own consumption → a product for exchange → a product for the owner → this is the path of development of the subject of physical labor in the historical process.

In the course of the formation of capitalism, another type of activity arose and became isolated – capital management. In the early stages of this process, capital management was organically linked to production. Creating his own business, the bourgeois was first forced to direct control of production. With the expansion of the business, he alone could no longer cope with the management, so he had to hire supervisors, foremen, managers; those managers with whom we started this article and to whom we still have to return. The stratum of managers grows with increasing of capital, and in the form of a joint-stock company all production management completely passes into the hands of hired managers. Shareholders only take part in capital management, but not in production. Can the activities of such a shareholder be considered as labor? In order to reasonably answer this question, we should move from objects to the goal of labor, from external forms, to internal relations, from being to essence.

2. Relations in the production process and the essence of labor

So, in order to produce a commodity at the current level of development of human society, the following conditions are necessary:

• the physical labor of the workers to transform matter;
• intellectual work of the manager for the organization of labor of workers;
• the intellectual work of a scientist, engineer, programmer, etc. for the production of ideas: discoveries, inventions, introductions into the production of new tools;
• the intellectual work of educators to educate the future workers and all other members of society;
• intellectual and physical labor of health workers to maintain the physical condition of the workers and all other members of society;
• finally, the work of artists to educate a comprehensively developed personality and meet the aesthetic needs of the workers and all other members of society.

Only in the presence of all these conditions do the spiky fields deliver bread to our table, a piece of coal from the mine turns into the light and heat of our houses, the wool of sheep grazing in faraway Australia warms our bodies, while we reading a smart book. Expressed in more general terms, the substance of nature thus enters into the circuit of our life.

It is easy to see that there is no private capital management activity in the above list. It is no longer socially necessary. All that is needed will be done without its participation. The capitalist as personified capital has as its goal the profit, the extraction of juices from the public flesh to ensure their personal consumption, retain personal power, fight against their personal competitors and maintain the power of their class. He is not just an unnecessary link in society, but it is constraining, hindering development and is inherently harmful. Therefore, such activities cannot be called labor in the political economic sense. Today, on the downward trend of capitalism, financial capital has already acquired an absolutely parasitic form. He is in no way connected with production, completely alienated from it. He gains profits from speculation, from price spikes on the exchange, often from the direct destruction of productive forces. Moreover, it is in this sector of fictitious capital that the main profits are being generated on a global scale.

Consequently, all types of physical and intellectual labor from the above list are socially useful, and all people engaged in this work can be called working people? This would be correct if the political superstructure did not rise above the economic basis, if the form did not affect the content of society.

3. From abstract to concrete

In reality, we live in a capitalist society with dominant bourgeois relations. This form dominates the picture described above and distorts the real manifestations of labor activity, which, in addition, can also flow one into another, being in unity and opposite, coexist and conflict.

The first thing we must pay attention to is the vast class of the petty bourgeoisie. The petty bourgeois, on the one hand, is the owner of the means of production, capital, and on the other hand, he himself is engaged in them either with physical or mental labor, and if he has several employees, he himself controls them. On the one hand, he can exploit his workers and live partly due to their labor, and on the other, he himself can be exploited by the big bourgeoisie – companies, corporations, retail chains, etc. On the one hand, he works, and on the other, he produces for the market. As long as his labor socially useful activity dominates the capitalist private property component, he is a worker. Nature does not tolerate such duality. As a rule, the petty bourgeoisie seeks the heyday of business, the hiring of more workers and retirement with the occupation of only money management. That is, becoming a true capitalist. But such a fate becomes true to a little minority of them. The majority goes bankrupt and passes to the position of an employee, but more and more seekers of happiness are recruited in their place, having absorbed the bourgeois ideology of the “American dream”, “success” and stubbornly replicated Elon Mask and Steve Jobs cases.

The case of the “top manager” is more complicated. If the above definition of the proletarian by Engels is applied uncritically to him, then he is like that – an employee who sells his intellectual potentialities, his ability to work as an administrator to his owner. But let us take a deeper look at its functions in the enterprise. Production management is just one of them. As a representative of the owner, he is obliged to provide him with continuous production of profit. If he does not, he will be immediately fired. Therefore, the manager is an exploitation tool in the hands of the owner. His objective interest is to squeeze surplus value out of workers. It is for this that he receives his high salary, which is not only the price of his labor, but also part of the profit of the owner, which he shares with him. Of course, in this amount it is impossible to visually separate the “labor pennies” from the “Judas’ pieces of silver”, but, in fact, his income is a converted form of capitalist profit. That is why the top manager is not a proletarian. That is why Lenin included this moment in his definition of classes that make it possible to define:

“Classes are large groups of people differing from each other by the place they occupy in a historically determined system of social production, by their relation (in most cases fixed and formulated in law) to the means of production, by their role in the social organisation of labour, and, consequently, by the dimensions of the share of social wealth of which they dispose and the mode of acquiring it. Classes are groups of people one of which can appropriate the labour of another owing to the different places they occupy in a definite system of social economy.” ⁴

Due to their place in the system of social production, the managers who manage this production receive their share of social wealth not for their personal work, but for the exploitation of someone else’s. The lower the position of the manager, the less power he has at his disposal over the workers, the less “increase” from the owner and the more his own labor is contained in his salary.

Let us now consider from this position the work of a teacher. He is certainly busy with a socially useful thing – the dissemination of knowledge, the transformation of the consciousness of his students, the education of future generations of producers and creators. And at the same time, he is forced to preach the values ​​of the ruling class, to introduce into the students’ minds the postulates of a society of exploitation, to prepare meek recruits of the labor army and characters of the future battle for a “place in the sun” in the conditions of capitalist competition. In the exact sciences, this is not yet noticeable but teachers of the humanities are forced to do this to a greater extent. And for the principal, this becomes the main content of the work. Thus, the poison of capitalist relations penetrates the public consciousness from childhood. And in the same way, for an education worker, this means a gradual transformation from a worker into an exploiter as they move up the career ladder.

From the same point of view, we can consider the work of any person. Perhaps it’s worthwhile to dwell briefly on the work of a programmer, as an especially often cited example. The programmer creates ideas – a product of intellectual labor. If at the same time he works on his own computer and sells his programs on the market, then he is a working petty bourgeois whom the capitalist system helps to turn ideas into goods. If he works for the owner for a salary, then the capitalist trades his ideas. These ideas, introduced at the enterprise of another capitalist, increase the labor productivity of the worker, and the surplus value produced by him, converted into profit, is shared between the capitalists, and part of it in the form of a salary goes to the hired programmer. In this case, he is a worker, who can even be called in the broad sense “the proletariat of mental labor”, as Engels once did ⁵.

But where is the boundary between socially useful labor and the service to the capital? How to separate the petty bourgeois from the big one? productive manager from the manager-exploiter? With whom the working class have to fight and with whom to make friends? The Marxist must answer this question with the question: “For what purpose are you interested?” For when considering not classes, but single people, the main thing is not their position in production, not the size of their salary, but their consciousness and practical activity. The most proletarian worker can be the bearer of bourgeois consciousness. And such are usually the vast majority in society, our ancestors observed them in the Nazi army, first with some hope, and then with the correct understanding that the consciousness of the ruling class dominates in public consciousness. On the other hand, a representative of the petty bourgeoisie or an intellectual can, having embarked on a proletarian position, accomplish many socially useful things for the benefit of the working class – the advanced class of modern society, with a future for it.