| This question <82|82> overall <84|89> Gza: <65|115>. (graded A) |
| Question 80: Imagine you were studying Marxism together with a friend, and the friend said to you: Doesn't the labor theory of value imply that, the more lazy and inept the laborer, the more valuable his commodity would be? How would you answer your friend? |
| [85] Gza: This is actually in response to Nazgul's answer [82]. Marx seems to admit that there is a dilemma with the “lazy worker,” and he also seems to provide two alternatives for analyzing the value of labor. One of Marx's analyses does not solve the problem of the “lazy worker” while his second analysis does. Marx's first analysis begins with the question of “value.” He says “a useful article has commodity value only because human labor in the abstract is objectified or materialized in it.” This means that labor is treated just like articles in the market place in that articles can be exchanged for other goods because articles have value in the sense that they use up resources from society (among other things). Labor, like articles also uses up society's supply of abstract labor. Marx suggests that the amount of goods that one can get from an article is dependent upon the amount of labor that went into the production of the article, or “how much labor was congealed in it” (Hans). This not only takes the direct labor of producing the article, but all other labor that is, or can be, marginalized. The value of the article is in the total labor that went into its production such as the time, the work the labor in making the tools, the resource gathering to make the tools; in a way it can become infinitely regressive in a sense, but it is over the “life time” (Hans), which suggests some limits although I am not sure to what extent. |
| Marx directly poses the problem of the “lazy worker” from the above analysis by stating that “it might seem that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of labor spent in its production, the more lazy and inept the laborer, the more valuable his commodity” (Marx 129). From this Marx shifts into the concept of average labor to get out of the “lazy worker” dilemma. He suggests that “the individual commodity counts here generally as an average of its kind” meaning that labor time and the commodity's use-value are to be looked at on the average. The majority of articles will contain the socially necessary labor time and as long as use-values are equal, the market will will treat various articles the same. The solution to the “lazy worker” is that he will have to “compete” with “average” workers producing identical articles, so he therefore cannot demand more because it took him longer. |
| Even resorting back to Marx's first value observational analysis, where value is determined in the total labor that goes into an article, it makes sense that if it takes me 8 hours to make a hat, I want to demand more than if it only took me 2 hours. I think Marx is using common sense in his analysis. However, within a market of homogeneous labor and products through human labor-power, there can only be one price. Therefore, Marx has to incorporate the “average” laborer into the value of exchangeability. |
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