Controversies
Marx regarded the distinction between abstract and concrete labour as being among the most important innovations he contributed to the theory of economic value, and subsequently Marxian scholars have debated a great deal about its theoretical significance.
For some, abstract labour is an economic category which applies only to the capitalist mode of production, i.e. it applies only, when human labour power or work-capacity is universally treated as a commodity with a certain monetary cost or earnings potential. Thus Professor John Weeks claims that
"...only under capitalism is concrete labor in general metamorphosed into abstract labor, and only under capitalism is this necessary in order to bring about the reproduction of class relations." - John Weeks, Capital and exploitation. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981, p. 38).
Other Marx-scholars, such as Makoto Itoh, take a more evolutionary view. They argue that the abstract treatment of human labour-time is something that evolved and developed in the course of the whole history of trade, or even precedes it, to the extent that primitive agriculture already involves attempts to economise labour, by calculating the comparative quantities of labour-time involved in producing different kinds of outputs.
In this sense, Marx argued in his book A contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) that
"This abstraction, human labour in general, exists in the form of average labour which, in a given society, the average person can perform, productive expenditure of a certain amount of human muscles, nerves, brain, etc. It is simple labour which any average individual can be trained to do and which in one way or another he has to perform. The characteristics of this average labour are different in different countries and different historical epochs, but in any particular society it appears as something given."
Marx repeats this point in Capital, Volume 1 (1867):
"Simple average labour, it is true, varies in character in different countries and cultural epochs, but in any particular society it is given." (Capital Volume 1, Penguin ed., p. 135, translation corrected).
In that case, it seems that the equation of different quantities of labour-time through economic exchange is actually not a necessary prerequisite for the abstract treatment of labour-time; all that is initially required is that different labour-efforts in society are comparable, yielding averages indicating the "normal" labour-time associated with a task. In this sense, an archaeologist comments about the Sumerian economy of ancient Mesopotamia as follows:
"For example, a balanced account of the labor provided by 37 female workers in the year 2034 BC indicates the different activities in which they were involved. Milling work took up 5,986 labor-days. The time dedicated to this task was calculated on the basis of the amounts of their finished products, that is, flour of different qualities. The source tablets for the balanced account provided the total amounts of the different types of flour milled. The time needed to produce these was calculated on the basis of standardized performance expectations. The accountant knew, for example, that 860 liters of fine flour had been produced during the year. As it was expected that one woman milled 20 liters of that type of flour in one day, it was easy to calculate that 43 labor days had been involved." - Marc van de Mieroop, "Accounting in Early Mesopotamia: some remarks", in Michael Hudson and Cornelia Wunsch, Creating Economic Order: Recordkeeping, standardization and the development of accounting in the ancient Near East. Bethesda: CDL, 2004, p. 56.
On the basis of their input, output and labour accounting, the Sumerian analysts, particularly from the Ur III period, were evidently able to estimate, in quantitatively accurate terms, how much labour it took to produce a certain quantity of output, and therefore how many workers were needed for a given interval of time. They lacked a money commodity, in the sense of a universal equivalent for exchanging goods, but nevertheless "The concept of value equivalency was a secure element in Babylonian accounting by at least the time of the sales contracts of the ED IIIa (Fara) period, c. 2600 BC." (op. cit., p. 38).
In other words, it proved possible already millennia ago to express the value of a quantity of product as a quantity of many other types of products, or a quantity of labour, according to prevailing norms of exchange based on production costs. "This formation and use of grain product equivalencies ... must be considered an important step in the direction of general value equivalencies best attested for in the Ur III period for silver, but then still generally applicable for other commodities such as grain or fish, including finally also labor time." (ibid.).
What the emergence of a cash economy then adds, is a much more refined and sophisticated quantification of amounts of society's labour-time, reckoned in money-prices - a further development of the abstraction of labour, which, however, was already occurring long before the advent of capitalist industry.
Thus, on this historical interpretation, capitalism universalizes the abstract treatment of labour-time, clearly separating paid work from other activities; through the universal use of money and clocks, all forms of labour become comparable in value, and can be economised and traded on that basis. But this economising occurs in a specific pattern: its capitalistic money-making purpose is to maximise the yield of surplus value to private owners of capital.
Another controversy concerns the differences between unskilled (simple) and skilled (qualified) labour. Skilled labour costs more to produce than unskilled labour, and can be more productive. Generally Marx assumed that - irrespective of the price for which it is sold - skilled labour power had a higher value (it costs more to produce), and that skilled work could produce a product with a higher value in the same amount of time, compared to unskilled labour. This was reflected in a skill hierarchy, and a hierarchy of wage-levels. In this sense, Friedrich Engels comments in Anti-Duhring:
"The product of one hour of compound labour is a commodity of a higher value—perhaps double or treble — in comparison with the product of one hour of simple labour. The values of the products of compound labour are expressed by this comparison in definite quantities of simple labour; but this reduction of compound labour is established by a social process which goes on behind the backs of the producers, by a process which at this point, in the development of the theory of value, can only be stated but not as yet explained. (...) How then are we to solve the whole important question of the higher wages paid for compound labour? In a society of private producers, private individuals or their families pay the costs of training the qualified worker; hence the higher price paid for qualified labour-power accrues first of all to private individuals: the skilful slave is sold for a higher price, and the skilful wage-earner is paid higher wages. - Friedrich Engels, Anti-Duhring, Part 2 Chapter 6
Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production would over time replace people with machines, and encourage the easy replacement of one worker by another, and thus that most labour would tend to reduce to an average skill level and standardized norms of work effort. However he provided no specific calculus by which the value of skilled work could be expressed as a multiple of unskilled work, nor a theory of what regulates the valuation of skill differences. This has led to some theoretical debate among Marxian economists, but no definitive solution has yet been given. In the first volume of Das Kapital Marx had declared his intention to write a special study of the forms of labour-compensation, but he never did so. In contemporary society, a division is emerging between creative, skilled and specialized jobs attracting extraordinarily large salaries, and routine jobs paying very low salaries, where the enormous differences in pay rates are difficult to explain.
Read more about this topic: Abstract Labour And Concrete Labour