| This question <56|71> overall <59|61> KT: <1214|250>. |
| Question 93: 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? |
| [60] KT: Responding to my friend, I would first talk about the quantity of value as written by Marx; whereby an “article has commodity value only because human labor in the abstract is objectified or materialized in it.” |
| When looking at labor then Marx points out that “The quantity of labor, again, is measured by its duration, the labor-time, which finds its standard of measurement in well-defined pieces of time like hour, day, etc.” So we know that labor gives the article value; while that labor is measured by the labor-time. So when my friend says that the lazy laborer would have a more valued commodity it seems correct. This is in fact incorrect when you examine abstract labor, which is more of an equal labor. “The labor, however, which constitutes the substance of value is equal human labor, expenditure of the same human labor-power.” When Marx wrote this he used equal as an average; while moving away from labor to labor-power to incorporate this average he eliminates the lazy laborer issue. |
| Hans: You are looking for the answer at the right place, but the argument still needs to be worked out better. |
| Prudon: I would like to add a little to KT's answer. When Marx considers any commodity in abstract, he abstracts from individual labor, be it a labor produced by a lazy worker or a hard worker. Speaking about average labor Marx means that value created, for example, by one hour of average labor has always to be the same. |
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