| This question <47|134-2> overall <127|127-2> Brutal: <106|127-2>. |
| Question 88: Does skilled labor (i.e., labor for which schooling and training is necessary, for instance the labor of an engineer) produce more value per hour than unskilled labor (like the labor of a janitor)? Explain! |
| [127-1] Brutal: skilled vs. unskilled labor Hans states in [43] that “One hour of skilled labor is two hours of unskilled labor in one, since one also has to count the time required to acquire the skill.” Therefore, the answer must be yes, skilled labor does produce more value per hour than unskilled labor. |
| The explanation, however, is a little more difficult. Kids [32] tried to equate the work of skilled and unskilled labor qualitatively, but the difference between the two is strictly quantitative (Hans [43]). Although the difference is only quantitative, Hans [47] states “By trading their commodities on the market, the members of society act as if all labor powers were equal (meaning qualitatively equal), but in reality they are not 100 percent equal.” In [45] Hans states that “Concrete labors are always qualitatively different. Therefore you can never compare them quantitatively.” The reason skilled and unskilled labor is compared quantitatively and not qualitatively is because we are only looking at the addition quantity of time needed to acquire the skill and not comparing the quality of skilled versus unskilled labor. |
| Hans: In the sentence from [43] you are quoting at the beginning I did not make myself clear enough: instead of saying that “One hour of skilled labor is two hours of unskilled labor in one” I should have said, commodity producing society treats them a such. |
| This is implicit in what you are saying later on, but you are not paying enough attention that differences in labor and differences in labor power is not the same thing. |
| I say for instance in [47] “By trading their commodities on the market, the members of society act as if all labor powers were equal, but in reality they are not 100 percent equal.” I did not mean “qualitatively equal”, I meant completely equal, like the labor power of twins, or that of you today and you tomorrow. I do not say: “By trading ..., the members of society act as if all labors were equal”, because this is not true. People trade things because of the differences in use values and the differences in the labors required to produce these use values (i.e., they cannot produce all these different use values themselves). But by trading people also make the statement that these differences can be reduced to quantitative differences only, because everything is measured in money which is only capable of quantitative differences. These quantitative differences are that all labors can be reduced to the expenditure of the same labor power. Since things can only have quantitative differences if their qualities are equal, I could have said “By trading ..., the members of society act as if all labors were qualitatively equal”. |
| Hope I have clarified things instead of confusing them. |
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