| This question <74|74> overall <73|75> Poppy: <718|162>. |
| Question 108: If the product is different, then the labor producing this product must be different as well. Isn't this obvious? Why does Marx act as if this was a scientific insight? |
| [74] Poppy: Zwieschlächtiges Schwert. Yes it makes sense and seems obvious, however, Karl Marx was the first to state and acknowledge that the nature of a laborer was twofold, just as it was known for a commodity. |
| Marx views all human labor as homogenous or in the abstract. Meaning, if you took labor out of any product or commodity, it would continue to remain a raw medium of nature. He acknowledges that labor, depending on what is being made or produced, is different, simple or hard, both of which should be added to the quantitative value of the produced product. He uses the example of coats and linen, where the labor to make the coats and linen are qualitatively different. He continues to state that the coat would be more complicated to make than weaving linen, which obviously means more labor would be involved in making the coat. Any labor value should be added to the produced product, so in this case, more labor value would be added to the price of the coat. |
| Marx sums this section up by stating that smaller quantity of complex labor ends up being equal to a larger quantity of simple labor. |
| Hans: The discovery Marx was so proud of was not that weaving labor is different than tailoring, but that the labor which produces use-value is different from the labor which produces value. He called the first labor concrete labor, and the second abstract labor. |
| I.e., your first paragraph is right. But the first sentence in the second paragraph is wrong. Only the abstract labor is homogeneous. Concrete labor isn't homongeneous, there are many qualitatively different kinds of concrete labor. |
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