| This question <64|72> overall <70|72> Desarrollo: <759|72>. graded B+ |
| 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. |
| [71] Desarrollo: Neolib asked for a clarification of this quote. |
| “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.” |
| Just as plants take minerals in the ground, water and sunlight and turn them into air for man to breathe, the conversion of commodities, which are produced by adding labor, into labor time is abstract. |
| Instead of photosynthesis there is work. Although it isn't apparent that commodities are made up of things that take labor time to create, they really are. It is the same as conceptualizing a plant as not a plant but the grouping of elements that turn things into “air.” |
| Now the concept of a plant as a machine that produces air is not the same type of abstraction. Neither would the chemical process, which shows plants using nitrogen and carbon dioxide and reproducing their cells and excreting oxygen. This would be more abstract. Instead of labor time meals and training and things like that would have to be taken into view. Marx wants to simplify commodities, not complicate them. Instead of air we have plant photosynthesis time. |
| Hans: Did you read p. 59 of the Annotations, where I commented on this Marx quote? |
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