| This question <69|69> overall <68|71> Charles: <68|85>. |
| Question 135: Just as a horse has muscles and bones in it, a commodity has useful labor and abstract labor in it. Explain. Is this also true for a product which is not a commodity? |
| [69] Charles: Labor and Abstract Labor in Commodity. A product may be a commodity or it may not be a commodity, but it sure will have useful labor and abstract labor in it depending how it can be related to the society. |
| Let's look at something which is not a main commodity in the market (meaning it is not being traded) and also there has been no labor associated with making that product. The product I have in mind is the “rock”. You can find rocks all over the place. Not a single minute of labor has been spent on creating the rock. Even though there has been no input of labor associated with the rock, there is an enormous use of labor associated with the rock when it is used for other purposes. The rock can be used for landscaping, construction, decorations, gravel, scientific research and many other things. I would agree that even if there is a product which is not considered a commodity, it can still have labor and abstract labor associated with it directly or indirectly. |
| Hans: If you dig a rock out of the ground in your backyard and make it part of a decorative garden display, then you are not producing a commodity (because it is not intended for sale), and you are applying concrete labor to the rock. One can say that this concrete labor "enters" the rock, because due to this concrete labor, the rock is no longer buried in the ground but it is cleaned and decoratively placed among some flowers. |
| In this whole process you are also using your labor-power. Perhaps you are spending part of your weekend doing this, you like the manual work after a week of office labor, it relaxes you and you can sleep better, and you look forward to a refreshing beverage afterwards. |
| If you were an employee of a landscaping firm, then this abstract labor would also add to the price of the landscaping service sold by this firm, and in this way, one can say that also the abstract labor and not only the concrete labor "enters the rock." It enters the rock in a different way than the concrete labor: it is manifested in the exchange-value of the rock, not the use-value of the rock. But if you do the labor in your own free time, then only the concrete labor enters the rock. The abstract labor, the use of your labor-time, is used up without entering the rock, just like the beverage you drink afterwards is used up without entering the rock. |
|
|
|||||