Abstract Labour and Concrete Labour - Abstract Labour and Exchange

Abstract Labour and Exchange

Marx himself considered that all economising reduced to the economical use of human labour-time; "to economise" ultimately meant saving on human energy and effort.

"The less time the society requires to produce wheat, cattle etc., the more time it wins for other production, material or mental. Just as in the case of an individual, the multiplicity of its development, its enjoyment and its activity depends on economization of time. Economy of time, to this all economy ultimately reduces itself. Society likewise has to distribute its time in a purposeful way, in order to achieve a production adequate to its overall needs; just as the individual has to distribute his time correctly in order to achieve knowledge in proper proportions or in order to satisfy the various demands on his activity." - Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Notebook 1, October 1857

However, according to Marx, the achievement of abstract thinking about human labour, and the ability to quantify it, is closely related to the historical development of economic exchange in general, and more specifically commodity trade.

The expansion of trade requires the ability to measure and compare all kinds of things, not just length, volume and weight, but also time itself. Originally, the units of measurement used were taken from everyday life - the length of a finger or limb, the volume of an ordinary container, the weight one can carry, the duration of a day or a season, the number of cattle. Socially standardized measurement units began to be used probably from circa 3000 BC onwards in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then state authorities began to supervise the use of measures, with rules to prevent cheating. Once standard measuring units existed, mathematics could begin to develop (see e.g. Dirk Jan Struik, A concise history of mathematics, 4th revised edition, 1987).

In fact, Marx argues the abstraction of labour in thought is the reflex of a real process, in which commercial trade in products not only alters the way labour is viewed, but also how it is practically treated.

If different products are exchanged in market trade according to specific trading ratios, Marx argues, the exchange process at the same time relates, values and commensurates the quantities of human labour expended to produce those products, regardless of whether the traders are consciously aware of that (see also value-form).

Therefore, Marx argues, the exchange process itself involves the making of a real abstraction, namely abstraction from the particular characteristics of concrete (specific) labour that produced the commodities whose value is equated in trade. Closely related to this, is the growth of a cash economy, and Marx makes the historical observation that:

"In proportion as exchange bursts its local bonds, and the value of commodities more and more expands into an embodiment of human labour in the abstract, in the same proportion the character of money attaches itself to commodities that are by Nature fitted to perform the social function of a universal equivalent. Those commodities are the precious metals."

In a more complex division of labour, it becomes difficult or even impossible to equate the value of all different labour-efforts directly. But money enables us to express and compare the value of all different labour-efforts - more or less accurately - in money-units (initially, quantities of gold, silver, or bronze). This is illustrated by the popular saying, "time is money" (after Benjamin Franklin). Marx then argues that labour viewed concretely in its specifics creates useful things, but labour-in-the-abstract is value-forming labour, which conserves, transfers and/or creates economic value (see Valorisation). Quite simply, a quantity of labour can earn, or be worth, a certain amount of money. The young Marx observed in 1844 that:

"As money is not exchanged for any one specific quality, for any one specific thing, or for any particular human essential power, but for the entire objective world of man and nature, from the standpoint of its possessor it therefore serves to exchange every quality for every other, even contradictory, quality and object: it is the fraternisation of impossibilities. It makes contradictions embrace." - Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844, section "The Power of Money"

In the feudal society of medieval Europe, Marx comments,

"The natural form of labour, its specific kind - and not, as in a society of commodity production, its universality - is here its immediate social form. The corvee can be measured by time in just the same way as the labour which produces commodities, but every serf knows that what he expends in the service of his lord is a specific quantity of his own personal labour-power. The tithe owed to the priest is more clearly apparent than his blessing. Whatever we may think, then, of the different character masks with which people confront each other in such a society, the social relations between individuals in the performance of their labour appear at all events as their own personal relations, and are not disguised as social relations between things, between the products of labour. (...) For a society of commodity producers - whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this business-like form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogenous human labour - Christianity with its religious cult of man in the abstract, more particularly in its bourgeois development, i.e. in Protestantism, Deism, etc., is the most fitting form of religion." - Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chapter 1, section 4, Penguin edition, p. 172 (translation corrected according to the German original, emphasis added)