Abstract labour and concrete labour
Encyclopedia
Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx
in his critique of political economy.
, where Marx writes:
The origin of the distinction between abstract and concrete labour can be traced back to Marx's 1857 Grundrisse
manuscript, in which he already distinguished between "particular labour" and "general labour", contrasting communal production with production for exchange (see Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Pelican edition 1973, pp. 171-172).
In statistical reports, for example, reference is made to "the labour force" and quantities of total hours worked are calculated. This is an abstract way of viewing human work, and the workers that perform it. Or, if we take the concept of an output/labour ratio (the ratio of the value of output and the number of hours worked or the number of workers), this is again an abstract way to view labour.
Another example is the concept of unit labour costs, i.e. the cost in labour per product unit, expressible in hours or in money-prices. In time use survey
s, a statistical attempt is made to quantify and average out the different types of activities people normally spend their time on.
In official economics, workers do not exist anymore; they are just an abstract "factor of production" or a "labour input" or a "consumer". Workers enter into the analysis only in management
theory. Managers of course often have to estimate the number of paid working hours that a job will take to do, hire and fire workers, and keep track of the number of paid hours worked. They have to be concerned with the "human face" of the market.
However, according to Marx, the achievement of abstract thinking about human labour, and the ability to quantify it, is closely related to the historical development of economic exchange in general, and more specifically commodity
trade.
The expansion of trade requires the ability to measure and compare all kinds of things, not just length, volume and weight, but also time itself. Originally, the units of measurement used were taken from everyday life - the length of a finger or limb, the volume of an ordinary container, the weight one can carry, the duration of a day or a season, the number of cattle. Socially standardized measurement units began to be used probably from circa 3000 BC onwards in ancient Egypt
and Mesopotamia
, and then state authorities began to supervise the use of measures, with rules to prevent cheating. Once standard measuring units existed, mathematics
could begin to develop (see e.g. Dirk Jan Struik
, A concise history of mathematics, 4th revised edition, 1987).
In fact, Marx argues the abstraction of labour in thought is the reflex of a real process, in which commercial trade in products not only alters the way labour is viewed, but also how it is practically treated.
If different products are exchanged in market trade according to specific trading ratios, Marx argues, the exchange process at the same time relates, values and commensurates the quantities of human labour expended to produce those products, regardless of whether the traders are consciously aware of that (see also value-form
).
Therefore, Marx argues, the exchange process itself involves the making of a real abstraction, namely abstraction from the particular characteristics of concrete (specific) labour that produced the commodities whose value is equated in trade. Closely related to this, is the growth of a cash economy, and Marx makes the historical observation that:
In a more complex division of labour
, it becomes difficult or even impossible to equate the value of all different labour-efforts directly. But money
enables us to express and compare the value of all different labour-efforts - more or less accurately - in money-units (initially, quantities of gold, silver, or bronze). This is illustrated by the popular saying, "time is money" (after Benjamin Franklin
). Marx then argues that labour viewed concretely in its specifics creates useful things, but labour-in-the-abstract is value-forming labour, which conserves, transfers and/or creates economic value (see Valorisation
). Quite simply, a quantity of labour can earn, or be worth, a certain amount of money. The young Marx observed in 1844 that:
In the feudal society of medieval Europe, Marx comments,
, and in terms of its capacity to create new value for the buyer of that labour.
Quite simply, in this case, a quantity of labour-time is equal to a quantity of money, and it can be calculated that X hours of labour - regardless of who in particular performs them - create, or are worth, Y amounts of new product value. In this way, labour is practically rendered abstract.
The abstraction is completed when a labour market is established which very exactly quantifies the money-price applying to all kinds of different occupational functions, permitting equations such as:
x amount of qualified labour = y amounts of unskilled labour = z amount of workers = p amount of money = q amount of goods.
This is what Marx calls a value relationship ("Wertverhältnis" in German). It can also be calculated that it costs a certain amount of time and money to train a worker to perform a certain task, and how much value that adds to the workers' labour, giving rise to the notion of human capital
.
As a corollary, in these conditions workers will increasingly treat the paid work they do as something distinct or separate from their personality, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Work becomes "just work", it no longer necessarily says anything at all about the identity
, creativity
or personality
of the worker. With the development of an average skill level in the workforce, the same job can also be done by many different workers, and most workers can do many different jobs; nobody is necessarily tied to one type of work all his life anymore. Thus we can talk of "a job" as an abstract function that could be filled by anybody with the required skills. Managers can calculate that with a certain budget, a certain number of paid working hours are required or available to do the work, and then divide up the hours into different job functions to be filled by suitably qualified personnel.
Marx's theory of alienation
considers the human and social implications of the abstraction and commercialization of labour. His concept of reification
reflects about the inversions of object and subject, and of means and ends, which are involved in commodity trade.
For some, abstract labour is an economic category which applies only to the capitalist mode of production
, i.e. it applies only, when human labour power
or work-capacity is universally treated as a commodity
with a certain monetary cost or earnings potential. Thus Professor John Weeks claims that
Other Marx-scholars, such as Makoto Itoh
, take a more evolutionary view. They argue that the abstract treatment of human labour-time is something that evolved and developed in the course of the whole history of trade
, or even precedes it, to the extent that primitive agriculture
already involves attempts to economise labour, by calculating the comparative quantities of labour-time involved in producing different kinds of outputs.
In this sense, Marx argued in his book A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) that
Marx repeats this point in Capital, Volume 1 (1867):
In that case, it seems that the equation of different quantities of labour-time through economic exchange is actually not a necessary prerequisite for the abstract treatment of labour-time; all that is initially required is that different labour-efforts in society are comparable, yielding averages indicating the "normal" labour-time associated with a task. In this sense, an archaeologist comments about the Sumerian economy of ancient Mesopotamia
as follows:
On the basis of their input, output and labour accounting, the Sumerian analysts, particularly from the Ur III period, were evidently able to estimate, in quantitatively accurate terms, how much labour it took to produce a certain quantity of output, and therefore how many workers were needed for a given interval of time. They lacked a money commodity, in the sense of a universal equivalent for exchanging goods, but nevertheless "The concept of value equivalency was a secure element in Babylonian accounting by at least the time of the sales contracts of the ED IIIa (Fara) period, c. 2600 BC." (op. cit., p. 38).
In other words, it proved possible already millennia ago to express the value of a quantity of product as a quantity of many other types of products, or a quantity of labour, according to prevailing norms of exchange based on production costs. "This formation and use of grain product equivalencies ... must be considered an important step in the direction of general value equivalencies best attested for in the Ur III period for silver, but then still generally applicable for other commodities such as grain or fish, including finally also labor time." (ibid.).
What the emergence of a cash economy then adds, is a much more refined and sophisticated quantification of amounts of society's labour-time, reckoned in money-prices - a further development of the abstraction of labour, which, however, was already occurring long before the advent of capitalist industry.
Thus, on this historical interpretation, capitalism universalizes the abstract treatment of labour-time, clearly separating paid work from other activities; through the universal use of money and clocks, all forms of labour become comparable in value, and can be economised and traded on that basis. But this economising occurs in a specific pattern: its capitalistic money-making purpose is to maximise the yield of surplus value
to private owners of capital.
Another controversy concerns the differences between unskilled (simple) and skilled (qualified) labour. Skilled labour costs more to produce than unskilled labour, and can be more productive. Generally Marx assumed that - irrespective of the price for which it is sold - skilled labour power had a higher value (it costs more to produce), and that skilled work could produce a product with a higher value in the same amount of time, compared to unskilled labour. This was reflected in a skill hierarchy, and a hierarchy of wage-levels. In this sense, Friedrich Engels
comments in Anti-Duhring
:
Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production
would over time replace people with machines, and encourage the easy replacement of one worker by another, and thus that most labour would tend to reduce to an average skill level and standardized norms of work effort. However he provided no specific calculus by which the value of skilled work could be expressed as a multiple of unskilled work, nor a theory of what regulates the valuation of skill differences. This has led to some theoretical debate among Marxian economists, but no definitive solution has yet been given. In the first volume of Das Kapital
Marx had declared his intention to write a special study of the forms of labour-compensation, but he never did so.
In other words, tradeable products do not all have a value because they can all be equated with sums of money, but because they are the products of social labour; consequently, such product-value exists quite independently of the use of money, and indeed independently of whether the products at any point in time happen to be traded or not (see also value-form
). It is just that what the magnitude of that value is, can become apparent and visible only via the comparisons of trading ratios, when products are being bought and sold on a regular basis. Marx did not think there was anything particularly mysterious about the fact that people valued products because they had to spend time working to produce them, or to buy them. However, academics have made many objections to his idea.
Without referring explicitly to Marx's solution of the problems of the labour theory of value
of David Ricardo
, the marginal utility
theorist William Stanley Jevons
clearly stated the main criticism of the concept of abstract labour in his 1871 treatise:
Replying to this type of criticism, the Russian Marxist Isaak Illich Rubin
argued that the concept of abstract labour was really much more complex than it seemed at first sight. He distinguished between "physically equal" labour; labour which is "socially equated" by means of consensual social evaluation or comparison; and labour efforts equated via the exchange of products using money as a universal equivalent http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/rubin/abstract-labour.htm.
To these three aspects we could add at least five others which are mentioned by Marx:
Some further aspects of the concept of abstract labour are provided by Marxian anthropologist Lawrence Krader
in his works Labor and value and A treatise of social labor.
The conceptual issues associated with the concept of abstract labour have been one of the main reasons why many economists abandoned the labour theory of value. Possibly, these conceptual issues can be resolved, through a better empirical appreciation of the political economy of education, skills and the labour market. One problem with Marx's own theory is, that he never completed a book he intended to write on the subject of wages and the labour market (see Capital Vol. 1, Penguin edition, p. 683). Nevertheless Marx made quite clear his belief that capitalism "overturns all the legal or traditional barriers that would prevent it from buying this or that kind of labour-power as it sees fit, or from appropriating this or that kind of labour" (Ibid., p. 1013). Clearly, Marx believed that capitalist development itself would establish a normal commercial value for any kind of labour, and thus that all kinds of labour would be judged socially according to the same kind of evaluative standards of effort.
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
in his critique of political economy.
Origin
Marx first advanced this distinction in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and is discussed in more detail in chapter 1 of CapitalCapital, Volume I
Capital, Volume I , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production, and of the class struggle rooted in the capitalist social relations of...
, where Marx writes:
The origin of the distinction between abstract and concrete labour can be traced back to Marx's 1857 Grundrisse
Grundrisse
The Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie is a lengthy manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx, completed in 1858. However, as it existed primarily as a collection of unedited notes, the work remained unpublished until 1939...
manuscript, in which he already distinguished between "particular labour" and "general labour", contrasting communal production with production for exchange (see Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Pelican edition 1973, pp. 171-172).
Abstract treatment of labour-time
In order to make this distinction, it must be possible to think abstractly about human work, and consider it separately from any particular worker performing it. Only on that basis, it is possible to conceive of quantities of labour (X amount of labour hours, or Y amount of workers) and work tasks (the kinds of jobs which need to be done, or functions which must be performed, irrespective of who actually does it). As soon as we ask, "how much work is necessary to produce something?", we begin to think abstractly about human labour.In statistical reports, for example, reference is made to "the labour force" and quantities of total hours worked are calculated. This is an abstract way of viewing human work, and the workers that perform it. Or, if we take the concept of an output/labour ratio (the ratio of the value of output and the number of hours worked or the number of workers), this is again an abstract way to view labour.
Another example is the concept of unit labour costs, i.e. the cost in labour per product unit, expressible in hours or in money-prices. In time use survey
Time use survey
A Time Use Survey is a statistical survey which aims to report data on how, on average, people spend their time.- Objectives :The objective is to identify, classify and quantify the main types of activity that people engage in during a definitive time period, e.g...
s, a statistical attempt is made to quantify and average out the different types of activities people normally spend their time on.
In official economics, workers do not exist anymore; they are just an abstract "factor of production" or a "labour input" or a "consumer". Workers enter into the analysis only in management
Management
Management in all business and organizational activities is the act of getting people together to accomplish desired goals and objectives using available resources efficiently and effectively...
theory. Managers of course often have to estimate the number of paid working hours that a job will take to do, hire and fire workers, and keep track of the number of paid hours worked. They have to be concerned with the "human face" of the market.
Abstract labour and exchange
Marx himself considered that all economising reduced to the economical use of human labour-time; "to economise" ultimately meant saving on human energy and effort.However, according to Marx, the achievement of abstract thinking about human labour, and the ability to quantify it, is closely related to the historical development of economic exchange in general, and more specifically commodity
Commodity (Marxism)
In classical political economy and especially Karl Marx's critique of political economy, a commodity is any good or service produced by human labour and offered as a product for general sale on the market. Some other priced goods are also treated as commodities, e.g...
trade.
The expansion of trade requires the ability to measure and compare all kinds of things, not just length, volume and weight, but also time itself. Originally, the units of measurement used were taken from everyday life - the length of a finger or limb, the volume of an ordinary container, the weight one can carry, the duration of a day or a season, the number of cattle. Socially standardized measurement units began to be used probably from circa 3000 BC onwards in ancient Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
and Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
, and then state authorities began to supervise the use of measures, with rules to prevent cheating. Once standard measuring units existed, mathematics
Mathematics
Mathematics is the study of quantity, space, structure, and change. Mathematicians seek out patterns and formulate new conjectures. Mathematicians resolve the truth or falsity of conjectures by mathematical proofs, which are arguments sufficient to convince other mathematicians of their validity...
could begin to develop (see e.g. Dirk Jan Struik
Dirk Jan Struik
Dirk Jan Struik was a Dutch mathematician and Marxian theoretician who spent most of his life in the United States.- Life :...
, A concise history of mathematics, 4th revised edition, 1987).
In fact, Marx argues the abstraction of labour in thought is the reflex of a real process, in which commercial trade in products not only alters the way labour is viewed, but also how it is practically treated.
If different products are exchanged in market trade according to specific trading ratios, Marx argues, the exchange process at the same time relates, values and commensurates the quantities of human labour expended to produce those products, regardless of whether the traders are consciously aware of that (see also value-form
Value-form
The value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of the political economy. It refers to a socially attributed characteristic of a commodity which contrasts with its tangible use-value or utility .The concept is introduced in the first chapter of Das Kapital where Marx argues...
).
Therefore, Marx argues, the exchange process itself involves the making of a real abstraction, namely abstraction from the particular characteristics of concrete (specific) labour that produced the commodities whose value is equated in trade. Closely related to this, is the growth of a cash economy, and Marx makes the historical observation that:
In a more complex division of labour
Division of labour
Division of labour is the specialisation of cooperative labour in specific, circumscribed tasks and likeroles. Historically an increasingly complex division of labour is closely associated with the growth of total output and trade, the rise of capitalism, and of the complexity of industrialisation...
, it becomes difficult or even impossible to equate the value of all different labour-efforts directly. But money
Money
Money is any object or record that is generally accepted as payment for goods and services and repayment of debts in a given country or socio-economic context. The main functions of money are distinguished as: a medium of exchange; a unit of account; a store of value; and, occasionally in the past,...
enables us to express and compare the value of all different labour-efforts - more or less accurately - in money-units (initially, quantities of gold, silver, or bronze). This is illustrated by the popular saying, "time is money" (after Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin
Dr. Benjamin Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat...
). Marx then argues that labour viewed concretely in its specifics creates useful things, but labour-in-the-abstract is value-forming labour, which conserves, transfers and/or creates economic value (see Valorisation
Valorisation
The valorisation or valorization of capital is a theoretical concept created by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. The German original term is "Verwertung" but this is difficult to translate, and often wrongly rendered as "realisation of capital", "creation of surplus-value" or...
). Quite simply, a quantity of labour can earn, or be worth, a certain amount of money. The young Marx observed in 1844 that:
In the feudal society of medieval Europe, Marx comments,
Abstract labour and capitalism
If the production process itself becomes organised as a specifically capitalist production process, then the abstraction process is deepened, because production labour itself becomes directly treated and organised in terms of its commercial exchange valueExchange value
In political economy and especially Marxian economics, exchange value refers to one of four major attributes of a commodity, i.e., an item or service produced for, and sold on the market...
, and in terms of its capacity to create new value for the buyer of that labour.
Quite simply, in this case, a quantity of labour-time is equal to a quantity of money, and it can be calculated that X hours of labour - regardless of who in particular performs them - create, or are worth, Y amounts of new product value. In this way, labour is practically rendered abstract.
The abstraction is completed when a labour market is established which very exactly quantifies the money-price applying to all kinds of different occupational functions, permitting equations such as:
x amount of qualified labour = y amounts of unskilled labour = z amount of workers = p amount of money = q amount of goods.
This is what Marx calls a value relationship ("Wertverhältnis" in German). It can also be calculated that it costs a certain amount of time and money to train a worker to perform a certain task, and how much value that adds to the workers' labour, giving rise to the notion of human capital
Human capital
Human capitalis the stock of competencies, knowledge and personality attributes embodied in the ability to perform labor so as to produce economic value. It is the attributes gained by a worker through education and experience...
.
As a corollary, in these conditions workers will increasingly treat the paid work they do as something distinct or separate from their personality, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Work becomes "just work", it no longer necessarily says anything at all about the identity
Identity (social science)
Identity is a term used to describe a person's conception and expression of their individuality or group affiliations . The term is used more specifically in psychology and sociology, and is given a great deal of attention in social psychology...
, creativity
Creativity
Creativity refers to the phenomenon whereby a person creates something new that has some kind of value. What counts as "new" may be in reference to the individual creator, or to the society or domain within which the novelty occurs...
or personality
Personality type
Personality type refers to the psychological classification of different types of individuals. Personality types are sometimes distinguished from personality traits, with the latter embodying a smaller grouping of behavioral tendencies. Types are sometimes said to involve qualitative differences...
of the worker. With the development of an average skill level in the workforce, the same job can also be done by many different workers, and most workers can do many different jobs; nobody is necessarily tied to one type of work all his life anymore. Thus we can talk of "a job" as an abstract function that could be filled by anybody with the required skills. Managers can calculate that with a certain budget, a certain number of paid working hours are required or available to do the work, and then divide up the hours into different job functions to be filled by suitably qualified personnel.
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation
Marx's theory of alienation , as expressed in the writings of the young Karl Marx , refers to the separation of things that naturally belong together, or to put antagonism between things that are properly in harmony...
considers the human and social implications of the abstraction and commercialization of labour. His concept of reification
Reification (Marxism)
Reification or Versachlichung, literally "objectification" or regarding something as a separate business matter) is the consideration of an abstraction, relation or object as if they had human or living existence and abilities, when in reality they do not...
reflects about the inversions of object and subject, and of means and ends, which are involved in commodity trade.
Controversies
Marx regarded the distinction between abstract and concrete labour as being among the most important innovations he contributed to the theory of economic value, and subsequently Marxian scholars have debated a great deal about its theoretical significance.For some, abstract labour is an economic category which applies only to the capitalist mode of production
Capitalist mode of production
In Marx's critique of political economy, the capitalist mode of production is the production system of capitalist societies, which began in Europe in the 16th century, grew rapidly in Western Europe from the end of the 18th century, and later extended to most of the world...
, i.e. it applies only, when human labour power
Labor power
Labour power is a crucial concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. He regarded labour power as the most important of the productive forces of human beings. Labour power can be simply defined as work-capacity, the ability to do work...
or work-capacity is universally treated as a commodity
Commodity
In economics, a commodity is the generic term for any marketable item produced to satisfy wants or needs. Economic commodities comprise goods and services....
with a certain monetary cost or earnings potential. Thus Professor John Weeks claims that
Other Marx-scholars, such as Makoto Itoh
Makoto Itoh
is a Japanese economist and is considered internationally to be one of the most important scholars of Marx's theory of value. He teaches at Kokugakuin University, Tokyo, and is professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo....
, take a more evolutionary view. They argue that the abstract treatment of human labour-time is something that evolved and developed in the course of the whole history of trade
Trade
Trade is the transfer of ownership of goods and services from one person or entity to another. Trade is sometimes loosely called commerce or financial transaction or barter. A network that allows trade is called a market. The original form of trade was barter, the direct exchange of goods and...
, or even precedes it, to the extent that primitive agriculture
Agriculture
Agriculture is the cultivation of animals, plants, fungi and other life forms for food, fiber, and other products used to sustain life. Agriculture was the key implement in the rise of sedentary human civilization, whereby farming of domesticated species created food surpluses that nurtured the...
already involves attempts to economise labour, by calculating the comparative quantities of labour-time involved in producing different kinds of outputs.
In this sense, Marx argued in his book A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) that
Marx repeats this point in Capital, Volume 1 (1867):
In that case, it seems that the equation of different quantities of labour-time through economic exchange is actually not a necessary prerequisite for the abstract treatment of labour-time; all that is initially required is that different labour-efforts in society are comparable, yielding averages indicating the "normal" labour-time associated with a task. In this sense, an archaeologist comments about the Sumerian economy of ancient Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia
Mesopotamia is a toponym for the area of the Tigris–Euphrates river system, largely corresponding to modern-day Iraq, northeastern Syria, southeastern Turkey and southwestern Iran.Widely considered to be the cradle of civilization, Bronze Age Mesopotamia included Sumer and the...
as follows:
On the basis of their input, output and labour accounting, the Sumerian analysts, particularly from the Ur III period, were evidently able to estimate, in quantitatively accurate terms, how much labour it took to produce a certain quantity of output, and therefore how many workers were needed for a given interval of time. They lacked a money commodity, in the sense of a universal equivalent for exchanging goods, but nevertheless "The concept of value equivalency was a secure element in Babylonian accounting by at least the time of the sales contracts of the ED IIIa (Fara) period, c. 2600 BC." (op. cit., p. 38).
In other words, it proved possible already millennia ago to express the value of a quantity of product as a quantity of many other types of products, or a quantity of labour, according to prevailing norms of exchange based on production costs. "This formation and use of grain product equivalencies ... must be considered an important step in the direction of general value equivalencies best attested for in the Ur III period for silver, but then still generally applicable for other commodities such as grain or fish, including finally also labor time." (ibid.).
What the emergence of a cash economy then adds, is a much more refined and sophisticated quantification of amounts of society's labour-time, reckoned in money-prices - a further development of the abstraction of labour, which, however, was already occurring long before the advent of capitalist industry.
Thus, on this historical interpretation, capitalism universalizes the abstract treatment of labour-time, clearly separating paid work from other activities; through the universal use of money and clocks, all forms of labour become comparable in value, and can be economised and traded on that basis. But this economising occurs in a specific pattern: its capitalistic money-making purpose is to maximise the yield of surplus value
Surplus value
Surplus value is a concept used famously by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Although Marx did not himself invent the term, he developed the concept...
to private owners of capital.
Another controversy concerns the differences between unskilled (simple) and skilled (qualified) labour. Skilled labour costs more to produce than unskilled labour, and can be more productive. Generally Marx assumed that - irrespective of the price for which it is sold - skilled labour power had a higher value (it costs more to produce), and that skilled work could produce a product with a higher value in the same amount of time, compared to unskilled labour. This was reflected in a skill hierarchy, and a hierarchy of wage-levels. In this sense, Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels was a German industrialist, social scientist, author, political theorist, philosopher, and father of Marxist theory, alongside Karl Marx. In 1845 he published The Condition of the Working Class in England, based on personal observations and research...
comments in Anti-Duhring
Anti-Dühring
Herrn Eugen Dührings Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, commonly known as Anti-Dühring, is a book written in German by Friedrich Engels, published in 1878. It had previously been serialised in a periodical. There were two further editions in German in the lifetime of Engels...
:
Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production
Capitalist mode of production
In Marx's critique of political economy, the capitalist mode of production is the production system of capitalist societies, which began in Europe in the 16th century, grew rapidly in Western Europe from the end of the 18th century, and later extended to most of the world...
would over time replace people with machines, and encourage the easy replacement of one worker by another, and thus that most labour would tend to reduce to an average skill level and standardized norms of work effort. However he provided no specific calculus by which the value of skilled work could be expressed as a multiple of unskilled work, nor a theory of what regulates the valuation of skill differences. This has led to some theoretical debate among Marxian economists, but no definitive solution has yet been given. In the first volume of Das Kapital
Das Kapital
Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie , by Karl Marx, is a critical analysis of capitalism as political economy, meant to reveal the economic laws of the capitalist mode of production, and how it was the precursor of the socialist mode of production.- Themes :In Capital: Critique of...
Marx had declared his intention to write a special study of the forms of labour-compensation, but he never did so.
Criticism
Marx believed that:In other words, tradeable products do not all have a value because they can all be equated with sums of money, but because they are the products of social labour; consequently, such product-value exists quite independently of the use of money, and indeed independently of whether the products at any point in time happen to be traded or not (see also value-form
Value-form
The value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of the political economy. It refers to a socially attributed characteristic of a commodity which contrasts with its tangible use-value or utility .The concept is introduced in the first chapter of Das Kapital where Marx argues...
). It is just that what the magnitude of that value is, can become apparent and visible only via the comparisons of trading ratios, when products are being bought and sold on a regular basis. Marx did not think there was anything particularly mysterious about the fact that people valued products because they had to spend time working to produce them, or to buy them. However, academics have made many objections to his idea.
Without referring explicitly to Marx's solution of the problems of the labour theory of value
Labor theory of value
The labor theories of value are heterodox economic theories of value which argue that the value of a commodity is related to the labor needed to produce or obtain that commodity. The concept is most often associated with Marxian economics...
of David Ricardo
David Ricardo
David Ricardo was an English political economist, often credited with systematising economics, and was one of the most influential of the classical economists, along with Thomas Malthus, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill. He was also a member of Parliament, businessman, financier and speculator,...
, the marginal utility
Marginal utility
In economics, the marginal utility of a good or service is the utility gained from an increase in the consumption of that good or service...
theorist William Stanley Jevons
William Stanley Jevons
William Stanley Jevons was a British economist and logician.Irving Fisher described his book The Theory of Political Economy as beginning the mathematical method in economics. It made the case that economics as a science concerned with quantities is necessarily mathematical...
clearly stated the main criticism of the concept of abstract labour in his 1871 treatise:
Replying to this type of criticism, the Russian Marxist Isaak Illich Rubin
Isaak Illich Rubin
Isaak Illich Rubin was a Russian economist and is considered to be the most important theorist of his time on the field of Marx's theory of value. His main work Essays on Marx's Theory of Value was published in 1924. During the course of the Great Purge he was executed in 1937.-Main Works:* Rubin,...
argued that the concept of abstract labour was really much more complex than it seemed at first sight. He distinguished between "physically equal" labour; labour which is "socially equated" by means of consensual social evaluation or comparison; and labour efforts equated via the exchange of products using money as a universal equivalent http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/rubin/abstract-labour.htm.
To these three aspects we could add at least five others which are mentioned by Marx:
- the existence of normal labour-averages applying to different work tasks, which function as "labour norms" in any society;
- the gradation of many different labour efforts along one general, hierarchical dimension of worth, for the purpose of compensation;
- the universal exchangeability of labour efforts themselves, in a developed labour market;
- the general mobility of labour from one job or worksite to another; and
- the ability of the same workers to do all kinds of different jobs.
Some further aspects of the concept of abstract labour are provided by Marxian anthropologist Lawrence Krader
Lawrence Krader
Lawrence Krader was an important American socialist anthropologist and ethnologist. At the Philosophy Department of the City College of New York from 1936 onwards he studied Aristotle with Abraham Edel, Leibniz with Philipp P. Wiener and mathematical logic and linguistics with Alfred Tarski...
in his works Labor and value and A treatise of social labor.
The conceptual issues associated with the concept of abstract labour have been one of the main reasons why many economists abandoned the labour theory of value. Possibly, these conceptual issues can be resolved, through a better empirical appreciation of the political economy of education, skills and the labour market. One problem with Marx's own theory is, that he never completed a book he intended to write on the subject of wages and the labour market (see Capital Vol. 1, Penguin edition, p. 683). Nevertheless Marx made quite clear his belief that capitalism "overturns all the legal or traditional barriers that would prevent it from buying this or that kind of labour-power as it sees fit, or from appropriating this or that kind of labour" (Ibid., p. 1013). Clearly, Marx believed that capitalist development itself would establish a normal commercial value for any kind of labour, and thus that all kinds of labour would be judged socially according to the same kind of evaluative standards of effort.
Recent discussion
In his book Crack Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2010), John Holloway (sociologist) considers abstract labour as the most radical foundational category of Marx's theory, and therefore he recommends the struggle against abstract labour as the centrepiece of the political struggle against capitalism.See also
- Working timeWorking timeWorking time is the period of time that an individual spends at paid occupational labor. Unpaid labors such as personal housework are not considered part of the working week...
- Law of valueLaw of value-General:The law of value is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo's economics...
- Value-formValue-formThe value-form or form of value is a concept in Karl Marx’s critique of the political economy. It refers to a socially attributed characteristic of a commodity which contrasts with its tangible use-value or utility .The concept is introduced in the first chapter of Das Kapital where Marx argues...
- Labour theory of value
- Exchange valueExchange valueIn political economy and especially Marxian economics, exchange value refers to one of four major attributes of a commodity, i.e., an item or service produced for, and sold on the market...
- Socially necessary labour timeSocially necessary labour timeSocially necessary labour time in Marx's critique of political economy is what regulates the exchange value of commodities in trade and consequently guides producers in their attempt to economise on labour....
- Labour powerLabor powerLabour power is a crucial concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. He regarded labour power as the most important of the productive forces of human beings. Labour power can be simply defined as work-capacity, the ability to do work...