| This question <59|71> overall <63|65> Hans: <55|66>. |
| 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. |
| [64] Hans: As abstract as a pile of ashes. Neolib [59] describes abstract labor very well: |
| 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. |
| This is one aspect of the labor process, the other is concrete labor. Together this gives the double character of labor: |
| 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. |
| Everything I quoted from Neolib is right, so far, except what is written in parentheses in this last paragraph. Neither the concrete labor, which materializes in the use-value, nor this use-value itself manifest themselves in the price of the commodity. Marx exactly arrived at abstract labor because he looked for the thing that manifests itself in the price of the commodity. Warning: what comes next is completely off: |
| 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. |
| What Marx calls here physiological “truth” should be better be understood as a physiological “necessity”. It is not the bottom line or ultimate meaning of our labor that it is abstract labor. The focus which the market places on abstract labor is rather degrading, oppressive, and impoverishing. The following passage from Marx can be considered a critique of the reduction to abstract labor: |
| “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.” |
| Can anyone explain what this quote means? (Please submit your explanation under the same question number as above, Question 99.) |
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