| This question <1649|1698> overall <1668|1670> Fidel: <1660|1956>. |
| Question 117: 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! |
| [1669] Fidel: In my inculcated capitalist worldview the answer seems obvious; skilled labor definitely produces more value per hour than unskilled labor. Why else would we pay Doctors so much money? That surface answer gives way after more consideration. We have been trained and trained over the years to see value as price or pay. In other words “market value” but not even the market recognizes this. A good salesmen will often earn more money than an electrical engineer. A dock worker more than a professor. |
| Marx says that complicated labor “counts” as multiplied simple labor. Hans further clarifies this by pointing out that “counts” is not the same as “is”. The “counts” is the market at work. |
| In the annotations Hans explains that labor has equal value but the market assigns a multiple to skilled labor versus unskilled labor. Capital is a critique of capitalism. Thus it is also a critique of how the market assigns market value which is very much in contrast to labor value. So what again is value? Value is derived from labor power. Everett remarked in [2001fa:163-3] that “when linen weaving is done by hand it contains more value than when it is woven by machine”. |
| Therefore value is the same whether it is a janitor or engineer doing the labor. It is not the commodity they produce but the labor power that went into producing it. |
| Hans: The equality of labor is not an ethical principle, but it is built into the structure of a market system to treat all labor as homogeneous with only quantitative (instead of qualitative) differences. This comes from the simple fact that the market equates all commodities to money, which is also only capable of quantiative, not qualitative, differences. |
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