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

[Michael Nuwer <nuwermj@xxxxxxxxx>]

Perelman, Michael wrote:
> 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.

Micheal,

Your view is one way to interpret Marx, perhaps it is the dominate way of 
interpreting him, but it is not the only interpretation. I have come to believe 
that the so called "value-form" theory of the labor theory of value is more 
"serviceable" then the dominate view.

However, I do not want to start a list-serve debate on this subject, so I will 
offer two passages and give you the last word. One passage is from Marx and, I 
think, addresses your comment above; the second passage is from Rubin and 
summarized a key point about abstract labor for value form theory.

<quote>
But the different kinds of individual labour represented in these particular 
use-values, in fact, become labour in general, and in this way social labour, only 
by actually being exchanged for one another in quantities which are proportional 
to the labour-time contained in them. Social labour-time exists in these 
commodities in a latent state, so to speak, and becomes evident only in the course 
of their exchange. The point of departure is not the labour of individuals 
considered as social labour, but on the contrary the particular kinds of labour of 
private individuals, i.e., labour which proves that it is universal social labour 
only by the supersession of its original character in the exchange process. 
Universal social labour is consequently not a ready-made prerequisite but an 
emerging result. Thus a new difficulty arises: on the one hand, commodities must 
enter the exchange process as materialized universal labour-time, on the other 
hand, the labour-time of individuals becomes materialized universal labour-time 
only as the result of the exchange process.
<end>
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/ch01.htm


<quote>
In Marx's theory of value, the transformation of concrete into abstract labor is 
not a theoretical act of abstracting for the purpose of finding a general unit of 
measurement. This transformation is a real social event. The theoretical 
expression of this social event, namely the social equalization of different forms 
of labor and not their physiological equality, is the category of abstract labor. 
The neglect of this positive, social nature of abstract labor has led to the 
interpretation of abstract labor as a calculation of labor expenditures in a 
physiological sense, namely a purely negative property of abstracting from the 
specific forms of concrete labor.

Abstract labor appears and develops to the extent that exchange becomes the social 
form of the process of production, thus transforming the production process into 
commodity production. In the absence of exchange as the social form of production, 
there can be no abstract labor.
<end>
I. I. Rubin
Essays on Marx's Theory of Value
Chapter Fourteen. Abstract Labor
http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubin/value/ch14.htm

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