RE: [Pen-l] Re: The Irrelevance of Workers In Economic Theory

["Perelman, Michael" <MPerelman@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Marx realized that all workers did not bring the same amount of abstract
labor to the table.  Unskilled workers can and do shift from job to job,
but not all workers can substitute for one another.  If that were the
case, Marx could have just wrote of work hours.  Time may be money, but
your time and mine might not command the same amount of money because of
differing levels of skills.



Michael  Nuwer wrote:

If you have the time and desire, would you be willing to elaborate? I
was thinking 
that the clause "one man during an hour is worth just as much as another
man 
during an hour" contains a hint about Marx's early thinking on abstract
labor and 
its relationship to abstract time. I see some continuity between this
clause and 
the following passage from the Introduction to the Grundrisse:

"Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society
in which 
individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where
the 
specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not
only the 
category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of
creating 
wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with
particular 
individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most
developed 
in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society - in the
United States. 
Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern
economics, namely 
the abstraction of the category 'labour', 'labour as such', labour pure
and 
simple, becomes true in practice."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm

I am following writers like Rubin, Murray and Colletti who maintain that
abstract 
labor is identical to alienated labor. Following this line, a modern
society which 
believes that "time is money" is a society dominated by abstract labor.




> 
> On 12/08/2008 1:46 PM, Michael Nuwer wrote:
>>
>> "the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the 
>> relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two 
>> locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man's hour is
worth 
>> another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth 
>> just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man
is 
>> nothing." [The Poverty of Philosophy]
>>
>>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01b
.htm 
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Michael Perelman
Economics Department
California State University
michael at ecst.csuchico.edu
Chico, CA 95929
530-898-5321
fax 530-898-5901
www.michaelperelman.wordpress.com
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