The Production Process in a Competitive Economy: Walrasian, Neo-Hobbesian, and Marxian Models

ed from in consideration of efficiency. Indeed, as we shall see in the penultimate section, the assertion that the class structure of capitalism induces a particularly high level of work resistance and hence promotes the extensive use of surveillance inputs differentiates the Marxian from the neo-Hobbesian view. But the above argument involves neither abstracting from surveillance inputs, nor considering surveillance to be a kind of false need induced through an endogenously generated disutility of labor. Quite the contrary, pure surveillance inputs s, with an exogenously determined labor extraction function, provide a particularly clear case of the above argument. Consider the indicated isowork function in Figure 1 as representing an amount of work effort capable of producing one unit of output. Starting at point a, were the firm to move along this 22Edwards (1979) refers to this as "technical control" in contradistinction to "bureaucratic control" or "simple control" of the production process. VOL. 75 NO. 1 BOWLES: PRODUCTION PROCESS IN A COMPETITIVE ECONOMY 29 isowork locus by raising wages and cutting surveillance inputs, the cost of labor would rise and hence the profit rate would fall, but output per unit of input would rise (1* remaining constant and s falling). This result arises because there is a tradeoff between surveillance and the wage rate in the labor extraction function, and while surveillance inputs are resource-using, the wage rate is not; hence raising wages and lowering surveillance may be efficient but not profitable. Thus cost minimization and efficiency do not coincide: the tradeoff in this case is not efficiency vs. equity, but efficiency vs.