| This question <41|45> overall <41|43> Hans: <38|52>. |
| Question 89: Why is labor measured here by labor-time, and not by counting how many movements were made, or by the drops of sweat of the laborer, or by the discomfort of the laborer? |
| [42] Hans: Careful, don't repeat past mistakes! The archives contain lots of wrong answers to this question, and this Semester's [40] and [41] continue this tradition of wrong answers. This is one of the drawbacks of making the archives available: on the one hand you are learning from the archives, but this also makes it much more difficult to start fresh and to erase past mistakes. |
| Perhaps my [2002fa:25] or the student contribution [2002fa:150-3] might be helpful for understanding why the above answers approached the question from the wrong angle. Right now I would only like to say one thing about this. One almost automatically associates labor with pain and discomfort. I'd like to argue that much of the reason for this is that we live in a society in which the labor process is exploited and therefore narrowly supervised in order to serve interests alien to the laborer. Production is one of the noblest human activities, and it can be a thoroughly satisfying and exhilarating experience. But in our society it is organized in such a way that it can be, and often is, an endless stream of pain and frustration. Most viciously, some people only get to do the fun things of production and others only the miserable things. This is vicious because it makes solidarity between the laborers more difficult. |
| The product is not produced by the pain or the sweat of the producer, but by the producer devoting his or her normal life activity to the purpose of producing this thing. This may imply discomfort and self-discipline, but it may also be a very joyful and satisfying activity. When allocating labor through the anonymous mechanism of market activity, society cannot look at the experience of the laborer but it must measure labor in the simplest and most universal way possible, which is labor-time. |
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