________________________________________ From: [email protected] [[email protected]] On Behalf Of Joseph Green [[email protected]] Sent: Sunday, July 17, 2011 10:45 PM To: Progressive Economics Subject: Re: [Pen-l] Ingo Elbe: Between Marx, Marxism, and Marxisms, Part I.3
Paul, I'm sorry to tear passages out of various of your comments and replies to other people and jumble them together, but it was the only way to keep this comment down to a reasonable size. Paul Cockshott wrote: > I think that they have got entirely the wrong end of the stick here in > confusing abstract labour with its historical form of > appearance in commodity producing society. Abstract labour is simply labour > under its general aspect of work > performed by humans, this stems from something prior to and independent of > commodity production : the unique > ability of the human species to learn new labour skills combined with an > ability to cooperate in the division of labour. No, you are wrong. You are confusing concrete human labor, which existed prior to commodity-producing society, and will continue to exist as long as human beings exist, with abstract human labor. Marx wrote in volume I of "Capital" that the amount of abstract labor-time embodied in a product is a "non-natural property" of the product, something that is "purely social". --------------------------- I would be interested in exactly which passage you mean, but in general the labour time in a product is something social, since it depends on the social productivity of labour, but that does not make human labour in the abstract something specific to capitalism. He says is is something specific to societies in which there is a division of labour, going to some length to illustrate this with non capitalist examples as well. " But tailoring and weaving are, qualitatively, different kinds of labour. There are, however, states of society in which one and the same man does tailoring and weaving alternately, in which case these two forms of labour are mere modifications of the labour of the same individual, and not special and fixed functions of different persons; just as the coat which our tailor makes one day, and the trousers which he makes another day, imply only a variation in the labour of one and the same individual. Moreover, we see at a glance that, in our capitalist society, a given portion of human labour is, in accordance with the varying demand, at one time supplied in the form of tailoring, at another in the form of weaving. This change may possibly not take place without friction, but take place it must. Productive activity, if we leave out of sight its special form, viz., the useful character of the labour, is nothing but the expenditure of human labour-power. Tailoring and weaving though qualitatively different productive activities, are each a productive expenditure of human brains, nerves, and muscles, and in this sense are human labour. They are but two different modes of expending human labour-power. Of course, this labour-power, which remains the same under all its modifications, must have attained a certain pitch of development before it can be expended in a multiplicity of modes. But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general. And just as in society, a general or a banker plays a great part, but mere man, on the other hand, a very shabby part,*22 so here with mere human labour. It is the expenditure of simple labour-power, i.e., of the labour-power which, on an average, apart from any special development, exists in the organism of every ordinary individual. " This is the first use of the term abstract labour in the English edition. Since our attention has been drawn to the French edition I cite the corresponding passage here as well: "Il y a cependant des états sociaux dans lesquels le même homme est tour à tour tailleur et tisserand, où par conséquent ces deux espèces de travaux sont de simples modifications du travail d'un même individu, au lieu d'être des fonctions fixes d'individus différents, de même que l'habit que notre tailleur fait aujourd'hui et le pantalon qu'il fera demain ne sont que des variations de son travail individuel. On voit encore au premier coup d'œil que dans notre société capitaliste, suivant la direction variable de la demande du travail, une portion donnée de travail humain doit s'offrir tantôt sous la forme de confection de vêtements, tantôt sous celle de tissage. Quel que soit le frottement causé par ces mutations de forme du travail, elles s'exécutent quand même. En fin de compte, toute activité productive, abstraction faite de son caractère utile, est une dépense de force humaine. La confection des vêtements et le tissage, malgré leur différence, sont tous deux une dépense productive du cerveau, des muscles, des nerfs, de la main de l'homme, et en ce sens du travail humain au même titre. La force, humaine de travail, dont le mouvement ne fait que changer de forme dans les diverses activités productives, doit assurément être plus ou moins développée pour pouvoir être dépensée sous telle ou telle forme. Mais la valeur des marchandises représente purement et simplement le travail de l'homme, une dépense de force humaine en général. Or, de même que dans la société civile un général ou un banquier joue un grand rôle, tandis que l'homme pur et simple fait triste figure, de même en est-il du travail humain. C'est une dépense de la force simple que tout homme ordinaire, sans développement spécial, possède dans l'organisme de son corps. Le travail simple moyen change, il est vrai, de caractère dans différents pays et suivant les époques ; mais il est toujours déterminé dans une société donnée. " It is interesting to note that in the French edition the term 'abstract' is applied to labour in the first sentence of paragraph 2 quite prior to the mention of a commodity, in the English edition the term abstract does not occur until further down in the paragraph and here in connection with the value a commodity being labour in the abstract. << But the value of a commodity represents human labour in the abstract, the expenditure of human labour in general. >> In English edition the term in the first sentence is human labour in general. In the French edition we have for the value of the commodity: <<Mais la valeur des marchandises représente purement et simplement le travail de l'homme, une dépense de force humaine en général. >> The key concept here is the expenditure of human energy in general in abstraction from its concrete form ---------------------- Joseph He wrote that when exchange equates a definite quantity of one product with a definite quantity of another, the result "represents a non-natural property of both, something purely social, namely, their value." (Capital, Kerr edition,vol. I, Chapter I, section 3, Subsection 2.2.3, p. 66.) The value being referred to is, of course, the amount of abstract labor contained in a product. If the value is a non-natural property, then so is the amount of abstract labor. ------------------------------------------------------- Paul That is true since the amount of labour contained in a product is a relationship between the product and its conditions of production in human society, but that is true of any society in which there is a division of labour not specifically a capitalist society. In les " états sociaux dans lesquels le même homme est tour à tour tailleur et tisserand" the coat would still have required a definite amount of human energy and time, even if all of this was done in turn by one person. ---------------------------- Joseph Marx even states that this is "purely social". Well, the amount of abstract labor usually has some connection to the amounts and types of concrete labor involved, although you can't measure concrete labor simply by a number. -------------------------- Paul That is because a quantity of concrete labour is what is called a dimensioned type it has the type hours * coat making for example, by abstracting from the concrete character of the labour you project it down onto the sub space of simple time. This is conceptually the same operation as we perform when we abstract from the substance of something and consider only its weight. A we can have the dimensioned quantity 5 kg sugar or 3 kg salt in order to add them we consider them just as weight, put them both on the scales and find we have 8kg of mass ignoring the substance. The abstraction operation for obtaining 8 hours labour time in general from 5 hours of coat making and 3 hours of spinning is conceptually identical. ------------------------- Joseph So what Marx is the stressing is that the very process of reducing concrete labor to abstract labor, and hence measuring it with a single number (the amount of abstract labor, the value), is something that is "non-natural". ------------------ Paul Where exactly does he state that or is it an inference you are making? In general such a reduction of the concrete to the abstract is not unnatural, the equivalence of gravitational mass is a natural instance of such an abstraction process. But in the case of the products of human labour you can argue that the labour embodied in them is always a social rather than a natural reality since the labour is always done in the context of some form of human society. But of course coats or spun linen are very un-natural objects anyway. Paul Cockshott wrote: > The claim that only a capitalist market allows the measure of abstract > socially necessary labour time turns Marx onto his head and reads him > without his advocacy of communism. Joseph One could,in any society, seek to define and measure the amount of abstract labor in a product, but what one would obtain is a "non-natural property" of a product. This "non-natural property" could be defined, but it would have lost its significance. ------------------ Paul Not at all, for example you can construct aircraft out of titanium or aluminium, but it requires much more labour to manufacture them out of titanium, this fact will be significant to any aircraft industry whether socialist or capitalist. Paul Cockshott wrote: > In a commodity producing society money is the form of representation of > this, but in other societies other forms of representation are possible. That is what the market socialists wish to the do: duplicate capitalist value while attempting to avoid the evil consequences of the law of value. It goes against the analysis put forward in "Capital". Market socialism just isn't really socialism. ------------------------------ Paul No, the market socialists wish to retain the same representation of labour as money, not a different representation. ------ Joseph * In particular, in dealing with these passages the distinction made by Marx and Engels between concrete and abstract labor is generally forgotten, or regarded as inapplicable to the planning of production. Socialist society will naturally pay close attention to the number of concrete labor hours needed to produce something. Value and the labor-content, however, are measured by abstract labor-hours, and thus don't deal with the qualitative differences between different types of labor, and between the different products which labor produces. Planning via the abstract labor-hour amounts to applying the law of value. Planning via concrete labor-hours means, among other things, that the economic effort needed to produce something can no longer be measured by a single number; that the qualitative differences between the labor of different people, between labor in different occupations, and between present and past labor must be taken into account; that the immediate labor devoted to a product is recognized as being only part of the economic cost of producing it; and that conscious attention is paid to the qualitative and material differences between different products and different sectors of the economy. These are very different types of planning. --------------------------- Paul This is true, and in the process of drawing up a final detailed plan the allocation of abstract labour to concrete tasks has to be specified, but you start out with a budget in abstract labour terms set by the size of the working population and the working year for a social plan, or a budget in terms of hours of labour for health care in the case of a plan for health care in the city of London. Within that broad total of so many million hours of work in health care, the relevant decision making bodies have to divy it up between things llike geriatric care, psychiatric services, accute coronary care etc, In making such decisions about how to divide up a labour budget they are reasoning initially in terms of abstract labour. Not all plans to turn this abstract labour into concrete labour will turn out to be feasible, at a detailed level they may find that although they would like 3 NMR scanners each valued at 50K hours, the delivery schedules at the NMR plants mean they can only have 2. So there is bound to be an iterative process in such resource allocation, but it can only get started and only be democratically controlled if there is an intial budgetary constraint to work within. The University of Glasgow, charity number SC004401 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
