No.8188
To make this easier to understand and refute the stupid version you're going to get from a lot of people, it helps to look at it purely from the manager's point of view. The manager has nothing to do with the contract between worker and capitalist, and in practical reality the manager does not sign any contract of the same sort whatsoever. False egalitarianism is a calling card of the charlatan. Managers are never, ever treated like workers; nor are they treated like corporate officers who are by their nature detached from workers altogether and work directly with stock.
Remember that labor is judged here in the abstract. The labor of the manager is not morally equal to the labor of corporate officers, which is not equal to that of workers under bondage. These things will never be equal in the important matter of the contract. For the corporate officer, their loyalty to the boss has more to do with the obligations of vassal to a lord. Whatever a contract stipulates, the corporate officer is never a purely abstract agent and would not be tolerated as such. The chief interest of the capitalist when hiring officers, much like the interest of a lord hiring a general or lieutenant, is loyalty. A corporate officer swears an oath of fealty or what effectively amounts to such when transferred to a new lord. That has always been the essential nature of the corporate officer. The corporate officer is not given over to any notion of ideology that suggests this is "good" or "natural" or a privilege worth crying over. The corporate officer understands the relationship because he is part of a chain of command necessarily to be an officer. That's what a large firm does. The distinction of corporate officers from the noble is that the corporate officer is adopted without any particular pedigree or historical reason why he "ought" to be there. You could hire a corporate officer from the dregs of society if you really wanted, so long as the behaved in line with the corporate world's value system and the bottom line of the firm. When you get down to it, this was the essential function of the warrior nobility in the past. They didn't believe they possessed magic that allowed them to rule with seriousness, though their degeneracy requires them to advance publicly this idea and never let go. If the noble couldn't fight in battle, if he was useless and proven so, his title was forsaken. There is no brotherhood among officers of any type. You have to understand this about any imperial system to understand the nature of these contracts, and from the outset Adam Smith's thinking is an imperial idea because he's looking at the East India Company's holdings most of all and asking what to do with it.
The arrangement of the manager is thoroughly technocratic. Whatever contract he signs with the capitalist is just words. The manager at a basic level is not obligated to the capitalist nor to capitalism as a system at all. Managers, those who would be of the technocratic sort, collude with each other. This is where human resources comes from. This habit is something managers understood from their long history of managing slaves, and the petty-manageral thought derives entirely from the institution of slavery which is above any notion of "the market" or any particular economic condition. Managers by their profession would have the same attitude in a socialist or feudal society, for their loyalty is to the essential act of slavery, and their profession exists for that essential act rather than for any ulterior motive.
To capital proper, the managerial task is a wholly unnecessary waste. The capitalist cares primarily about his officers doing what they are there to do. The capitalist's relationship to his officers is not one of alienation but of a simple hierarchy. There is not and never has been any ambiguity about these people and what they are like. The manager's task is dominated by obfuscation precisely because in an ideal situation, the manager would be removed. There would be the capitalist's plan for the firm and there would be the workers who implement that plan. If the workers manage the sundry affairs of daily labor themselves this doesn't change anything fundamentally, nor would it change anything if the workers were treated well and held some entitlement apart from capital. The officers care primarily about being officers, and so if these officers were part of a communist organ they would maintain the world view of officers and never once see themselves as workers or make false equivocation. The manager too does not believe in or need false equivocation but for different reasons. The manager's function is wholly rooted in his alienation from all things but management. He is in other words the "abstract capitalist", except the manager really has no reason to believe capital or money is worth anything. The manager envisions his scheme continuing through a regime of forced ignorance about technology and the truth, because if there were no ambiguity in any operation, there would be no argument the manager has except one expedient; torture for torture's sake, the outcome of which we need not doubt because we have seen its results every day. The manager as a rule does nothing productive whatsoever, because productivity is anathema to his function. The officer often works in the area he is commanded to work.
What you see in Marx is an obfuscation where the officers and any center of authority is made "unknowable" and petty-managers are presented as a wholly alien force injected into the society of everyone else. And so, it is the managers who see surplus, variable "capital" (human capital i.e slaves but Marx doesn't call it that), and ask how much more can be extracted from sweat. The capitalist officer doesn't believe that he has a genuine moral argument for the menial worker and never once even suggested that was needed. The capitalist claim is that the world consists only of officers or otherwise useless persons, and the managers beneath the officers are not just useless persons but specifically troublesome worthless persons. If the capitalist did acknowledge the worker's existence, and this is not some moral outrage and capitalists and workers have always understood each other at a basic level, the capitalist simply recapitulates his thinking of what society will be and what he is there to do, and that common workers have no place in his society whatsoever. If the worker doesn't like it, he can't do a whole lot about it. Kill the capitalist? Maybe. Usually the action of the worker was to steal from the capitalist because that was one of the only freedoms he had, and the capitalist sensed that he should probably let the mafia have an acceptable level of theft because that has been the arrangement of hitherto known human society. It was the manager who obsessed over loss prevention less because it was his wealth and more because it was a pretext to invade the lives of workers, usually to accuse them of some fictitious theft because the managers always, always steal from their bosses and insist on an imperious right to do so.
What the common worker sees in all of this is yet more bullshit to tell him what he can do in a world htat was never his, and now he is told he has to conform to wholly alien social codes of petty-managers and even if he did conform to this code the managers are just going to torture him more. Compliance was never an option. What the worker can do is hold what little he had left and cobble together an existence wholly outside of the political and the system of firms, and to some extent this was recognized as a necessity. Officers are primarily tasked with ruling and fighting rather than daily labor and maintenance, and operations research tells the officer not to allocate operations equally and to specialize as much as possible, absent a greater necessity for someone to be a generalist. There is no reason for arbitrary specializations where someone is convinced an essential act like being a cahsier is some alien and unknowable labor task and the specialization at any given day of work is primarily about the work task rather than the people doing it, but officers are always officers and the hierarchy is established on that basis rather than on a petty basis. The manager revels in creating every arbitrary distinction because as a manager he has no more than the lowest worker. You will even see in the 21st century that managers are hired off the street to do some dirty business and just as quickly released, because the program today is openly and proudly democidal and that has become the chief value.
So what was the reason for "surplus value" if it's just a managerial illusion? It is a proxy for the essential act of exploitation and alienation, which has always been a feature of a slave relation. The slave has no moral obligation to masters or the system whatsoever, and the common worker was in every sense a slave; legally, morally, socially. What distinguished the worker from others was that he was not made chattel as the Negro was, nor was he of the lowest class. The distinction between worker and lowest class is stark and the lowest class is the historical great enemy of labor, who has always been the first to attack when things go wrong. Members of the lowest class see no value in any of this and their lives are wholly removed from the human race. Humanism has always been our enemy, and so the managerial program usually means maximizing our torure and using us as the eternal excuse to justify some new outrage.
In effect, Marx's theory seeks to ask how the worker can be made either the lowest class or a borugeois manager or officer. The officers would be the communist part, the managers their useful lackies who maximize the efficiency of this new slave system, and Marx is a partisan of the slave power for obvious reasons.