I received this reply from Brendan Cooney, who appears to be very miffed because I criticize him for spreading confusion on the question of abstract labor:
I don’t discuss labor power or surplus value in this chapter because this is a chapter about abstract labor. Similarly, Marx develops the concept of abstract labor in chapter 1 of Capital, but waits until later chapters to develop Surplus Value and Labor Power. However, my chapter does discuss the fact that in a capitalist society workers are developed for their general capacity to do any labor, rather than for specific labors, which is related to the concept of labor power.
However, I really can’t respond to any of your criticism as it is a constantly moving target. First you say that I neglect to say that labor-power and abstract labor are the same concept. Then, when pressed for a citation of this, you provide a citation which does not prove your claim. When I point out the logical fallacy of your claim, you now change your argument to be that I should have “mentioned labor power”, without explaining why this is necessary in order to explain the concept of abstract labor. You have never responded to my criticism of the idea that labor power cannot be the same thing as abstract labor. Then you leap to the claim that I have argued that surplus value can be produced with out producing value… I don’t see the connection. Then onto something about Christopher Arthur, which is completely irrelevant and has nothing to do with my original post.
Oddly, Brendan asserts he does not discuss labor power in his post because he is discussing abstract labor.
Of course, my original criticism of his post is that he neglected to mention that that labor power is what Marx meant when he referred to “human labor in the abstract”. As I pointed out in my response to his criticism, Marx defines abstract labor this way:
“Let us now consider the residue of each of these products; it consists of the same unsubstantial reality in each, a mere congelation of homogeneous human labour, of labour power expended without regard to the mode of its expenditure. All that these things now tell us is, that human labour power has been expended in their production, that human labour is embodied in them. When looked at as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values.” [My emphasis]
I offered this citation to Brendan, who nevertheless accuses me of never responding to his criticism. He then accuses me of being a moving target, of offering no citation to support my claim that in Marx’s theory abstract labor is synonymous with labor power, and even of changing my argument. His single response to my substantive argument is that:
“If that was the case, then the value of commodities is formed by the ability of people to work. Saying that the value of commodities is formed of labor which has been performed is different than saying that value is formed by the capacity to perform labor.”
I direct the reader’s attention to the above passage from Capital. Does Marx assert that the value of commodities is formed by the ability of people to work? Certainly, I can be criticized for truncating Marx’s argument in my original comment. It is true that in my original criticism of his text, I state that abstract labor is synonymous with labor power, but where in the text I cited from Capital does Marx suggest that value is formed by the capacity to perform labor? Marx clearly argues that the expenditure of labor power in production creates the values embodied in commodities.
Brendan is clearly trying to change the subject from the substance of value as defined by Marx in the actual text of Capital to my poor paraphrasing of Marx’s argument.
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As we all know the workers sells her labor power to the capitalist. The employment of her labor power in production is the source of surplus value and thus profit in Marx’s labor theory of value. But, for some reason, it remains a great mystery among Marxist theorist today where value itself comes from in Marx’s theory. If these Marxists are to be believed surplus value comes from the expenditure of labor power, but value itself comes from the expenditure of abstract labor.
Other than one being the source of value and the other being the source of surplus value, how does abstract labor differ from labor power? Labor power is a commodity that is bought and sold in the market. It is thus specific to the capitalist mode of production. But this can’t be right, because, as Brendan tells us, abstract labor is also “the result of specific [capitalist] social relations, and not an eternal category of all human history.”
So it would seem that both labor power and abstract labor are specific to the capitalist mode of production and could not have arisen prior to this epoch. Which makes this statement by Marx very bewildering:
“Money may exist, and did exist historically, before capital existed, before banks existed, before wage labour existed, etc. Thus in this respect it may be said that the simpler category can express the dominant relations of a less developed whole, or else those subordinate relations of a more developed whole which already had a historic existence before this whole developed in the direction expressed by a more concrete category. To that extent the path of abstract thought, rising from the simple to the combined, would correspond to the real historical process.” Marx, Grundrisse
If money existed prior to the capitalist mode of production what specific social relations did this money express? It could not have expressed capitalist social relations because those social relation obviously did not exist. Yet, if we are to believe Marx, money expressed the value of commodities, it was the phenomenal form of this value expressed in their exchange. Each exchange told us that the commodities contained a common social substance, that human labour power has been expended in their production.
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We are thus left with a riddle for you Marxist theorists, Brendan: if labor power is specific to the capitalist mode of production, how is it that money, the phenomenal expression of the production and exchange of the products of human labor power arose prior to the capitalist mode of production?
How does this relate to Chris Arthur, Brendan? You should get out more. Like you, Arthur asserts the categories discussed here are specific to the capitalist mode of production. You have already swallowed three-fourths of his value-form argument. You need to rethink this chapter of your book before you swallow the rest.
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EDIT: For purposes of clarity, I feel it necessary to add that labor power (abstract labor) is in no way specific to the capitalist mode of production. What is specific to the capitalist mode of production is the buying and selling of labor power as a commodity. In both simple commodity production and capitalist production proper, the expenditure labor power is the source of value. In the capitalist mode of production, where labor power is sold as a commodity, the expenditure of labor power becomes, in addition to the source of value, the source of surplus value.
The Real Movement 
Bah humbug.
Consider the first few paragraphs of Chapter 1, up to Jehu’s quote (“Let us now consider the residue…”). We can leave aside for the moment such questions as the history of money or the possibility of Value in non-capitalist society.
In the opening paragraphs, Marx establishes that wealth in capitalist society is predominately in the form of commodities. Roughly retracing classical political economy, Marx notes that exchange in capitalist society points towards a quantitative Value property of commodities. With the idea of Value, the concept of a general equivalence is already in play here but this early in the essay he has left it as a commonly understood reality — he’ll explore its historic moment later.
We have commodities, then, and – abstracted of all particular useful properties particular to each commodity – Value. And, again following classical political economy, Marx notes that what is common to all commodities is that they are products of labor. Somehow, Value and labor must be intimately related. Labor in general “makes things”. Perhaps labor must somehow “make Value”.
Here now, Marx parts way with classical political economy and in a critical way (pun intended).
Within a single paragraph – the one quoted by Jehu – Marx first notes that the qualitatively common property among commodities – of being products of labor – is, and this ought to be emphasized, an “***unsubstantial reality***”.
On the face of a commodity may be *signs* of its productive origins involving human labor, but these are merely signs. That the commodity is a product of human labor is ultimately social knowledge, not a physical property of the commodity itself. That a commodity, at a point in (let’s say) astronomical time happens to be a product of labor (rather than some autonomous process) is ephemeral knowledge. It is an *unsubstantial reality*. It is a social fact whose materiality is in, for example, people’s brains and words, not in the commodity itself.
In that same paragraph … again, I’ll add my own emphasis:
“When ***looked at*** as crystals of this social substance, common to them all, they are – Values. ”
I do not think Marx means here: “Well, dear reader, please look at it this way and you will see…”
Rather, Marx is talking about how Capitalist society itself “looks at” commodities. The social fact of “looking at” commodities as Values is materially exposed in the process of exchange but as we see is not identical to the process of exchange. In a society in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, commodities are widely, generally, effectively viewed as *crystals* (a *material* metaphor) of “this social substance,” namely labor power (which is an *unsubstantial reality* of commodities).
Value, it would seem, is both real AND imaginary. It is materially present in exchange and, at the same time, it is an imagined aspect of commodities — one way out of potentially many of looking at commodities. One way of thinking about them, of handling them. Value is an idea that guides our collective actions around commodities.
The quantification of abstract labor power, in other words, is *produced by* the social practice of seeing things a certain way. This, incidentally, seems to me to be the problem with vulgar materialism: the problem for the individual is not so much that a portion of her work day is unpaid. The deeper problem is that her expenditures of labor power are somewhat mystically quantified (as Value) in the first place.
Jehu here sticks to the formulation that labor power is productive of Value and I think that is problematic (not exactly false). It is certainly true and consequential in Capitalist society that labor power is socially regarded as productive of Value. Yet, Value itself is the product of a way of thinking.
What expenditure of labor power exactly instills a commodity with Value? It would seem from Marx that it is not specifically the labor power that goes most directly into the production of that commodity. Rather, the expenditure of labor power that gives the commodity Value must include all of the labor power that instills in the minds of people the ideology and practices of Value.
Schematically, one might say that whoever taught you about earning wages, buying what you need, etc. — those labors did not merely describe but also helped to *produce* the value of the pencil you bought years later.
We imagine that commodities have Value and therefore they do. And because we imagine Value to be quantitative, therefore we imagine our labor power to be both the product of and producer of Value in quantifiable ways. And because our imagination of Value is fixated on Commodities, we collectively materialize Value in these concrete ways, arranging our behavior in relation to the (imaginatively) observed “crystals of Value”. And because Value materially appears before our very eyes as these crystals of Value, we believe in Value.
The abolition of Value and with it wage labor, property, the political state and so forth — that revolution — comprises more than anything else the development and activation of a capacity to see the *things* that already exist in a different way – a way in which commodities are no longer “***looked at*** as crystals of this social substance, common to them all”.
To see a factory without seeing a capital or a good without imagining it to have a specific Value — that must be some part of the individual in communism.
I think this must be Postone meant when he said that we needed a new imaginary.
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I am likely to agree with you on this, Thomas. And even more likely if you can show me a way to unsee the value of commodities. How are you defining the term “produce”? Postone notwithstanding, show me a device to unimagine the US$ and you will show me communism.
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I’m trying to follow the argument. Is it not correct to say “concrete labor” is the physical labor observed with our senses — e.g. tailoring, weaving — and “labor power” is how Marx refers to concrete labor “in the abstract” to derive the laws of capitalism?
If it’s correct, then:
1. Brenden’s post leaves out the term “labor power” because he may be following the value-form school’s definition, which asserts Labor Power is a category specific to capitalism — i.e. the commodification of labor — rather than a category common to all laboring societies in the past. I’m unfamiliar with the disagreements between the various factions surrounding Marx’s work.
2. Does this fundamentally change any parts of Brenden’s post, specifically his effort to distinguish abstraction generally with the abstraction described by Labor Power under the capitalist mode of production?
3. If he acknowledged the synonymous nature of labor power and abstract labor, could he leave that chapter alone for the most part?
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There’s only a single act of labor. This act of labor is the actual physiological expenditure of some definite quantity of human labor power. According to Marx, when we consider the usefulness of this expenditure of labor power, we have in mind the particular concrete labor involved, tailoring or weaving. When we consider the value created by this expenditure of labor power, we have in mind not its particular useful character, but its quality simply as the expenditure of human labor power without regard to the particular mode of this expenditure.
This is precisely the same method Marx employs when he discusses the twofold character of the commodity. There should be no surprise here. Certain Marxist theorists want to muddle the issue because their value-form agenda (in which a worthless piece of paper can be money) cannot be accommodated by Marx’s theory.
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In the introduction to his Grundrisse manuscript, Marx argued that the category of abstract labour “expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations”; but, he continued, only in modern bourgeois society (exemplified by the United States) is abstract labour fully realized in practice. Because only there does a system of price-equations exist within a universal market, which can practically reduce the value of all forms and quantities of labour uniformly to sums of money, so that any kind of labour becomes an interchangeable, tradeable good or “input” with a known price tag – and is also practically treated as such. In the Grundrisse, Marx also distinguished between “particular labour” and “general labour”, contrasting communal production with production for exchange.
Marx published about the categories of abstract and concrete labour for the first time in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and they are discussed in more detail in chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, where Marx writes:
“On the one hand all labour is, speaking physiologically, an expenditure of human labour power, and in its character of identical abstract human labour, it creates and forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is the expenditure of human labour power in a special form and with a definite aim, and in this, its character of concrete useful labour, it produces use values. … At first sight a commodity presented itself to us as a complex of two things – use value and exchange value. Later on, we saw also that labour, too, possesses the same twofold nature; for, so far as it finds expression in value, it does not possess the same characteristics that belong to it as a creator of use values. I was the first to point out and to examine critically this twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities. … this point is the pivot on which a clear comprehension of political economy turns”.
Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, labour power, from the physical act of working, labour. Labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly.
Under capitalism, according to Marx, the productive powers of labour appear as the creative power of capital. Indeed, “labour power at work” becomes a component of capital, it functions as working capital. Work becomes just work, workers become an abstract labour force, and the control over work becomes mainly a management prerogative.
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Thank you.
As I was looking into this I ran across a footnote in chapter 1 by Engels regarding the term “Labour” (n.16):
“As has been stated in a previous note, the English language has two different expressions for these two different aspects of labour: in the Simple Labour-process, the process of producing Use-Values, it is Work; in the process of creation of Value, it is Labour, taking the term in its strictly economic sense. — F. E.”
This made me realize “labour” in Marx’s work is already an abstraction similar to the abstract notion of “ball”. When he needs to be specific, he often writes “concrete labour” or “labor in the abstract” to refer to whichever aspect of labour is required in context. Labour Power, therefore, means something more specific than just labour in the abstract.
Chapter 6: The Buying and Selling of Labour-Power (first and second paragraph):
“The possessor of money does find on the market such a special commodity in capacity for labour or labour-power.
By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description.”
So it might be more accurate to state Labour Power is the capacity for Labour — pretty much what kapitalism101 was getting at in the comment thread.
I’m not sure if dropping labour-power completely from a discussion about abstract labour is the best move, but I don’t see any evidence he did so to subvert Marx’s argument regarding the source of value.
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Yeah, simply put Jehu confuses the non-realized potential for something with the realized result of the same potential. This is what disturbs Cooney as well. The capacity to perform labour is NOT the same thing as the realization of this capacity. Abstract (and, of course, concrete) labour results from the consumption of labour-power by the capitalist. Simple as that really. I’m not sure what Jehu is going on about, but it sure seems like a whole heap of confusion.
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Sorry, but Marx never states that abstract labor results “from the consumption of labour-power by the capitalist.” If you can find a quote to this effect, please produce it. I am not sure why you Marxists cannot read.
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Cannot read?
Ch 7, section 1.
“The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer.”
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“The capitalist buys labour-power in order to use it; and labour-power in use is labour itself. The purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work. By working, the latter becomes actually, what before he only was potentially, labour-power in action, a labourer.”
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OMG! The capitalist buys labor power to use it for what purpose? To produce ‘abstract labor’? To produce value? Of course not. The capitalist buys and employs labor power for neither purpose and you should know this by now. Capital is production of surplus value, production for profit. Try reading Capital again. And this time actually look at the words, comrade.
I cannot believe you Marxists are such dunderheads. No wonder we have failed!
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You need to stop putting words in my mouth. Try reading my response to your question instead. In context. If you’re capable. And stop slithering around the issue we’re discussing.
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So, then permit me to ask you if it is your contention that when a tailor, employing his own means of production, produces a suit of clothes for exchange, he is not thereby converting his own labor power (labor potential) into “labor-power in action”? Do you contend he is not producing value by this act? Do you hold, as Chris Arthur and the value-form school does, that this is only useful concrete labor that produces no value? Do you further contend, as does the value-form school, that until labor power is bought and sold as a commodity it produces only concrete labor?
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No. Why on earth would you think that?
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The point is that the potential for labour is not the same thing as the realization of this potential. This is what we are discussing. Try to keep on point. Please.
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Answer. The. Fucking. Question. Does the individual producer, creating a use-value for exchange, create value through the expenditure of his labor power?
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I’ve already answered. In a previous post. Now. You answer. Do you still hold to the erroneous position that labour-power and abstract labour are identical concepts? If so, please provide citations.
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Answer the question, dude. Or go away.
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I have answered. For someone going on about reading capabilities you’re not very diligent. Read. My. Previous. Fucking. Post. Hint: it begins with “no”.
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Okay, then we are cool. We appear to agree that the expenditure of labor power in the production of goods for exchange creates value irrespective of whether the labor power was sold as a commodity to the capitalist. There is no doubt between us that Marx refers to the expenditure of labor power, when he speaks of “abstract labor” or “labor in the abstract” in chapter one. And there is no doubt that value, exchange value, money, etc. appear before the capitalist epoch. Thus, when Marx refers to these categories, it is not true that he is referring solely to the capitalist mode of production, but to commodity production generally.
If we agree on this, I have no quarrel with you. But I insist on it and accept no rereading of Marx that suggests otherwise.
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Of course abstract labour results from the expenditure of labour power. But this does not mean these two concepts, labour power and abstract labour, are identical, as you claim they are.
You have still not managed to provide any citations in support of this position.
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Yes, if you had read the above post, you would have seen I accepted the criticism. That is why I ignored your point. However I also cited Marx directly and he did not make that mistake. That was about 20 comments ago and no one has yet acknowledged it.
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“Brendan is clearly trying to change the subject from the substance of value as defined by Marx in the actual text of Capital to my poor paraphrasing of Marx’s argument.”
Finally here we have some sort of admission that Jehu’s incorrect in saying that labor power and abstract labor are THE SAME THING. If he does not think they are the same thing, he should retract that claim CLEARLY, and then go on to say what exactly is incorrect about my treatment of the concept.
As to the Marx citation: As a commenter on my blog immediately responded to Jehu “there is a difference between labor power expended and labor power”. In the citation Marx says that abstract labor is the EXPENDITURE of labor power without regard to the mode of its expenditure. But he doesn’t equate abstract labor and labor power. I agree with the commenter that this does make all the difference. I see other people in this thread also understand and agree with this distinction.
RE this:
“If these Marxists are to be believed surplus value comes from the expenditure of labor power, but value itself comes from the expenditure of abstract labor.”
I have no problem saying that value is created through the expenditure of labor-power. But I have a problem with saying that value is created by labor-power because that literally means that value is created by the capacity for work… which makes no sense. But one cannot reverse your formula to say that surplus-labor comes from the expenditure of abstract labor, at least not in and of itself. Surplus value arises from the difference between the use-value and value of labor power, that labor power as a use-value is used to create value, while as an exchange value is purchased at a distinct price. The term “Abstract labor”, because it is not a term which refers to a commodity like labor power, cannot explain surplus value. Indeed, political economy before Marx could not theorize exploitation because they thought that wages and the value of the product created by workers were the same thing, ie that capitalists bought labor, not labor power. If MArx had said that the capitalist buys abstract labor, rather than labor power, he could not have theorized exploitation.
As regards the matter of capitalist categories like abstract labor and their existence prior to the capitalist mode of production, I deal with this in my original post, though Jehu conveniently leaves that out entirely, trying instead to make me out to be a value-form theories or something… I’m am not sure why he is so hell bent on this. I’m not sure he ever read my original post all the way through.
This entire conversation, I believe, is based on a mischaracterization of my original post. Luckily, I don’t have time to waste on this argument any more, so consider this my final response. If Jehu cares to comment on future posts of mine, I hope he can address the actual content of the posts and not invented straw-men.
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Brendan, stop it. As you know, I immediately corrected myself when it was first raised. This is not about the distinction between labor power and the expenditure of labor power. My quote from Marx addresses that issue conclusively. This is about your attempt in your original post to treat abstract labor as some mysterious category divorced from or separate from the expenditure of labor power. Anyone can read the original post and see this.
You know or should know why this is important given the constant distortion of Marx’s theory by opponents of his labor theory of value — not “value theory “. As long as you correct your error I really don’t give a shit how you duck and weave
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I am not aware of any retraction you ever made on this point. Usually retractions begin with “I was wrong…” if you no longer believe that abstract labor and labor power are the same thing then I have no idea what your beef is, unless it is just throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks, constantly shifting the target. This entire discussion has been such a waste of time. Surely there is nothing in my post that is a defense of value-form theory. And anyone who reads the post can see that I say in many ways that value is created by labor during the labor process, etc. Your whole approach has been entirely dishonest and trite, not in the spirit of truth seeking, but instead focused on elevating yourself and brining attention to yourself, which has backfired and made you look like a fool. Have a nice life on the internet with the rest of the trolls, but I am done with this conversation.
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Jesus, Brendan, you might begin with this post, where I state: “Certainly, I can be criticized for truncating Marx’s argument in my original comment. It is true that in my original criticism of his text, I state that abstract labor is synonymous with labor power…”
Or you might revisit your own original post where I state in a comment: “Yes, of course. The capacity to work (labor power) is expended in the process of labor. This expenditure is the source of the value contained in the commodity. I am not sure how this is not already given in my answer.”
In two separate responses directly to you I acknowledged this. But why do you insist on returning to this issue, Brendan? What is it in your post that embarrasses you? Could it be that I caught you red-handed trying to treat “abstract labor” as a separate and distinct category from the expenditure labor power ala the value-form school?
Just edit the post to reflect the fact that, in Marx’s labor theory of value, abstract labor is nothing more than the expenditure of human labor power. There is nothing mysterious about it. As long as you do this, I have no quarrel with you. But I will not stand by quietly as an “orthodox” Marxist revises LTV according to the current fad.
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I’m not sure Brenden’s discussion about abstract labour alone is so blasphemous as the claim it “..revises LTV according to the current fad”. If the fear is that his post somehow gives ammunition to Marx’s opponents, maybe you could specify how he does that. Do you honestly believe he following some value-form school agenda by deliberately “injecting ambiguity” to “claim value arises from exchange rather than production as Marx insisted”?
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Perhaps, but in that case Brendan can clear things up by stating unequivocally that the expenditure of labor power is the source of value. He could also add that this does not require the buying and selling of labor power as a commodity. Finally, he could explain that the categories Marx introduces in the first three chapters of Capital — value, exchange value and money — all precede the capitalist mode of production. If he were to do this there would be no ambiguity in his post.
Brendan could have done this at any point and we would not be having this tedious discussion.
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I guess I don’t see the ambiguity. Just to be clear that he wasn’t making a value-form school argument (value arises from exchange), he wrote near the end:
“The “value-form approach” , on the contrary, leads us to the conclusion that labor is solely concrete before commodities exchange and that therefore value doesn’t exist until exchange happens. (The “value-form approach” is often referred to as a “circulationist approach” since it implies that value arises in circulation rather than production.) This eliminates the concept of intrinsic value, so crucial to Marx’s value theory, as argued in a previous chapter.”
followed by this:
“Marx wanted to show that money, the universal equivalent, was just a developed form of the simple-form of value and that the form of value was an expression of the intrinsic value already existing in commodities. Thus, money is an inescapable part of any commodity-producing society. The social ills of capitalism are the result of the contradictions of the commodity form, not of some monetary distortion imposed on the natural order of things.”
and finally this:
“When Rubin and the so-called “value-form school” argue that labor is rendered abstract in exchange, and that therefore value is created in exchange, they undo Marx’s value-form argument against Proudhon. Capitalism is given its distinctive form by exchange and not by commodity production. This point of view produces a politics which focuses on eliminating markets with planning rather than eliminating the capitalist mode of production. Marx’s view suggests a much more radical vision in which we are challenged to create a society in which work is not an alienated abstraction.”
However, he didn’t discuss labour-power nor surplus-value in detail because he wanted to focus on abstract labour, which is nothing other than the expenditure of labour-power in Marx’s argument, which begs the question why not cut straight to the chase and directly discuss the categories Marx’s argument rather than the philosophy, in general, of abstract labour. After all, he does directly mention the category “surplus-value” when he writes, “…capitalist production has one goal and this is to extract the maximum amount of surplus-value from the workers”, so why not also mention labour-power briefly as well (you might criticise the accuracy of that sentence [capitalism production of surplus-value versus extraction of surplus-labour])? If this is your position, I think you may have a point. It’s hard to judge the chapter by itself out of the context of the book. The question is can the chapter still retain its focus on abstract labour if he worked in labour-power being the source of value, value arising from production not exchange, and the categories value/exchange value/money preceding captalism, or will that most likely mean a total re-write?
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Rory, I am not an editor. I initially made note of the fact that Brendan managed to write an entire post on abstract labor without mentioning labor power. I think that is weird, since Marx clearly treats abstract labor and the expenditure of labor power as synonymous. That was my only issue.
I leave it to Brendan to figure out what his book should say.
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The tone of your initial comment may have come across as more than just a “note”. And later on there was an somewhat ambiguous accusation that Brendan of perpetuating a value-form school argument. Things snowballed from there. Either way, the title of this post is “Brendan Conney, you’re gonna need a re-write on that book”. So I’m genuinely wondering if you identified a larger problem with the level of attention he gives to abstract labour, or is your only problem with the omittance of expended labour-power and it’s relationship/synonymy with abstract labour, not with the overall subject of the post.
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There is a larger problem, but it is not particular to Brendan’s post. That larger problem is one I have been thinking about addressing on my blog. I believe far too many Marxist writers hold to the view that value as a category is specific to the capitalist mode of production. This leads to a number of questionable conclusions. In fact, what is specific to the capitalist mode of production is not value but the breakdown of production based on exchange value.
However. as I said, this problem is not peculiar to Brendan’s presentation and it would be a distraction to develop it here.
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Ah, great!
At least, this debate crystalized the concepts of value and its varous interpretation for me.
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Marx: “The body of the commodity that serves as the equivalent, figures as the materialisation of human labour in the abstract, and is at the same time the product of some specifically useful concrete labour. This concrete labour becomes, therefore, the medium for expressing abstract human labour.”
If concrete labour is simply the medium for expressing abstract human labour, I see no way to un-bundle abstract labour from socially necessasy labour.
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This is about one peculiar instance of concrete labour – the concrete labour that creates the equivalent – and not about concrete labour in general. As I read the passage.
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Isaak Rubin in his 1924 second edition (page 112 https://archive.org/details/IsaakRubinEssaysOnMarxsTheoryOfValue1924SecondEdition) himself said that value existed prior to capitalism (this passage was deleted in his third edition on which the English translation is based): “Value exists not only in capitalist economy, but also in simple commodity economy.”
However, and perhaps relevant for this blog post, Rubin continued: ‘This means that the “creator” of value is abstract labour, and not wage labour (labor-power), which is characteristic only for the capitalist economy’. Rubin’s claims about labor-power were criticised by Isaak Dashkovskij (search my translation of his article on libcom).
Btw, there is a project for a volume with translations of all this Rubin-related material. In the meantime, for some new translations of Rubin (and in which also speaks of ‘simple commodity production’) check out Responses to Marx’s Capital: From Rudolf Hilferding to Isaak Illich Rubin.
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