| This question <44|47> overall <44|46> Hans: <44|47>. |
| 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! |
| [45] Hans: Quantity and Quality Meta [37] is asking two difficult questions. First question: |
| If, in general dialectical terms, we accept that simple quantitative changes will lead to qualitative changes, then where and when does simple labor “change” into skilled labor? Or it doesn't change at all? Years of education? Years of experience? |
| Concrete labors are always qualitatively different. Therefore you can never compare them quantitatively. But society, when it organizes production, sees these labors as quantitative, because it has only a one-dimensional measuring stick, the price. This quantity, like every quantity, may turn into quality, but if it does, then this does not mean that the abstract labor becomes concrete. Perhaps it means that some labor producing commodities turns into wage labor, while other commodity producers turn into capitalists. |
| Is accepting that skilled labor is just an aggregate of the simple labor a good assumption if we can “neither deny nor confirm” this assumption by asserting that “there is no law against it or supporting it”? Are we sacrificing something in the process when explaining the difference between skilled and simple labor by reduction to this simplification? |
| We know that society reduced the differences between different labor powers to merely quantitative differences, because the products from these different labor power are traded on the market and they stand in a quantitative exchange relation. All Marx says here is that this process takes place but it does not take place in a very regular way. |
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