| This question <73|64> overall <58|60> Neolib: <29|100>. graded A– |
| Question 99: What is abstract human labor? I want you to say what it is, not what its significance is in commodity-producing society! These are two different questions. |
| [59] Neolib: Abstract Human Labor. Just defining what abstract labor is seems lacking, so allow me to elaborate. |
| Simply put, all forms of labor will have at least one commonality- that being the expenditure of human nerves, brains, muscles, etc... Marx refers to this common substance as abstract human labor. |
| Marx uses an example with the tailor, and the weaver. Although both are involved in qualitatively different aspects of human labor (quantitative as well), the expenditure of human activity as defined above, is considered abstract human labor. |
| Marx argues that the core of the economy is immune to the useful character of labor in a production based capitalist system. More pointedly he feels that “under capitalism labor has social significance only as abstract labor (Ehrbar).” |
| “Nor is it any longer the product of carpentry, masonry spinning, or any other kind of special productive labor. Along with the useful characteristics of the products of labor, the useful characteristics of the various kinds of labor represented in them dissapear.” (i.e become abstract) |
| Dr. Ehrbar states (as does Marx) that this leads to homogeneous labor that no longer is differentiated, but rather abstract, which means “indifferent towards the special form of labor (Contribution, 271:1).” |
| “Only the common character of these labors remains: they are reduced to equal human labor, to an expenditure of human labor power without consideration of the particular form in which it was spent (Kapital, 128:2).” |
| In explicit regard to the question, and as Dr. Ehrbar noted, this abstraction can be seen in two lights. On one hand it is the labor involved in the production process, which materializes in the use value of a product (often manifesting itself in the price of said commodity). On the other hand it is simply the expenditure of human activity involved in the labor process, which is what Marx is speaking of in this respect. |
| “This reduction takes the form of an abstraction, but it is an abstraction that is made every day in the social process of production. The conversion of all commodities into labor time is no greater an abstraction, and is no less real, than the resolution of all organic bodies into air” (Contribution, 272:3/o). |
| Marx feels that all useful labors are functions of the human organism, and regardless of nature or form of these endeavors, the bottom line (physiological truth he calls it) is that the realization came about as a result of the expenditure of human labor power, or human labor in the abstract. I think that I have defined what abstract human labor is. Please pardon my slight digression in lightly relating its significance in relation to production. |
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