| This question <21|32> overall <24|26> Hans: <19|26>. |
| Question 65: Why is labor measured here by labor-time, and not by counting how many movements were made, or by the drops of sweat of the laborer, or by the disutility of the laborer? |
| [25] Hans: Why measure labor by time? Flipmode says in [21] that it would be inefficient to measure labor by counting movements because some workers make more movements but get less done than others. This argument can be used against labor-time as well: some workers take longer but get less done than others. |
| Question 65 is a very abstract question. We are not used to thinking at such an abstract level, therefore we try to substitute something more concrete. Flipmode apparently thought, like most of the others who answered this questions in past semesters, that the issue was: how does a modern capitalist firm measure whether its employees work “enough”? Flipmode represents the consensus in that earlier discussion, namely, that labor-time is inefficient, but at least it is more practical than the other methods proposed. |
| Alas, this was not the issue at all. Let's look at the context of question 65. Marx looks at the commodity exchange and says: commodities are exchangeable in our society because they all contain the same abstract human labor. Then he asks: how is the quantity of the exchange-value determined, i.e., how is it determined how many other commodities you get for your own? His answer is: Of course by how much labor is in the commodity. And his next question is: how to measure labor? And his answer is: of course by labor-time. |
| This is where Question 65 interrupts: Why do you always say “of course”? Is time the only way to measure labor? Can one not measure it by how busy the worker is, or by how much effort he or she has to put in, or by how uncomfortable the worker is when working? |
| Let's talk about the laborer's discomfort first. This is not quite as abstract and it may be a good introduction into the more abstract issues involved. In footnote 16 of chapter One, Marx quotes Adam Smith, according to whom the commodity's exchange value comes from the worker's sacrifice of “his ease, his liberty, and his happiness,” and then Marx says: labor creates value not because of these sacrifices but because labor is man's normal life activity. |
| Marx says this because the worker's unease and unhappiness is an individual mental and physical condition, but it does not have social significance. There is no transmission belt translating unhappiness into exchange-value. Well, you might wonder, is there a transmission belt translating normal human life activity into exchange-value? But yes, there is! If someone produces good A which does not sell, then she can stop producing good A and switch into producing good B. Her normal life activity allows her to produce, not just one thing but many different things, and it is very relevant for society how this labor-power is used. We pay for commodities not because we have pity for the workers' suffering, but because these commodities have taken up part of society's limited pool of labor-power. |
| I tried to say it somewhat pointedly in the Annotations: a thing has exchange-value because the labor which went into producing this thing could also have been used for producing something else. It is therefore not the particular content of the labor, in Marx's words it is not the concrete labor, but it is the abstract labor which creates value. And if you want to measure the quantity of that abstract labor, then time is pretty much the only choice. Marx writes in Contribution, 271:2/o: “variations in the duration of labor are the only possible difference that can occur if the quality of labor is assumed to be given.” |
| I'll stop here with my attempt to clarify Marx's abstract and subtle steps. Maybe this made a little sense. Some study questions sound almost stupid but they are really quite difficult. They are even difficult for me. If you find it interesting to tackle one of those, don't try to give a full answer. Try to give some valid arguments which may throw light on the question. Try to recognize the unspoken reasoning behind Marx's simple language. |
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