Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy.

Origin

The twofold nature of the production for exchange purposes.

Marx first advanced this distinction in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) and it is discussed in more detail in chapter 1 of Capital, where Marx writes:

The origin of the distinction between abstract and concrete labour can be traced back to Marx's 1857 Grundrisse manuscript, in which he already distinguished between "particular labour" and "general labour", contrasting communal production with production for exchange (see Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Pelican edition 1973, pp. 171-172).

Abstract treatment of labour-time

In order to make this distinction, it must be possible to think abstractly about human work, and consider it separately from any particular worker performing it. Only on that basis, it is possible to conceive of quantities of labour (X amount of labour hours, or Y amount of workers) and work tasks (the kinds of jobs which need to be done, or functions which must be performed, irrespective of who actually does it). As soon as we ask, "how much work is necessary to produce something?", we begin to think abstractly about human labour.

In statistical reports, for example, reference is made to "the labour force" and quantities of total hours worked are calculated. This is an abstract way of viewing human work, and the workers that perform it. Or, if we take the concept of an output/labour ratio (the ratio of the value of output and the number of hours worked or the number of workers), this is again an abstract way to view labour.

Another example is the concept of unit labour costs, i.e. the cost in labour per product unit, expressible in hours or in money-prices. In time use surveys, a statistical attempt is made to quantify and average out the different types of activities people normally spend their time on.

In official economics, workers do not exist anymore; they are just an abstract "factor of production" or a "labour input" or a "consumer". Workers enter into the analysis only in management theory. Managers of course often have to estimate the number of paid working hours that a job will take to do, hire and fire workers, and keep track of the number of paid hours worked. They have to be concerned with the "human face" of the market.

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.

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 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:

In the feudal society of medieval Europe, Marx comments,

Abstract labour and capitalism

If the production process itself becomes organised as a specifically capitalist production process, then the abstraction process is deepened, because production labour itself becomes directly treated and organised in terms of its commercial exchange value, and in terms of its capacity to create new value for the buyer of that labour.

Quite simply, in this case, a quantity of labour-time is equal to a quantity of money, and it can be calculated that X hours of labour - regardless of who in particular performs them - create, or are worth, Y amounts of new product value. In this way, labour is practically rendered abstract.

The abstraction is completed when a labour market is established which very exactly quantifies the money-price applying to all kinds of different occupational functions, permitting equations such as:

x amount of qualified labour = y amounts of unskilled labour = z amount of workers = p amount of money = q amount of goods.

This is what Marx calls a value relationship ("Wertverh ltnis" in German). It can also be calculated that it costs a certain amount of time and money to train a worker to perform a certain task, and how much value that adds to the workers' labour, giving rise to the notion of human capital.

As a corollary, in these conditions workers will increasingly treat the paid work they do as something distinct or separate from their personality, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Work becomes "just work", it no longer necessarily says anything at all about the identity, creativity or personality of the worker. With the development of an average skill level in the workforce, the same job can also be done by many different workers, and most workers can do many different jobs; nobody is necessarily tied to one type of work all his life anymore. Thus we can talk of "a job" as an abstract function that could be filled by anybody with the required skills. Managers can calculate that with a certain budget, a certain number of paid working hours are required or available to do the work, and then divide up the hours into different job functions to be filled by suitably qualified personnel.

Marx's theory of alienation considers the human and social implications of the abstraction and commercialization of labour. His concept of reification reflects about the inversions of object and subject, and of means and ends, which are involved in commodity trade.

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

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

Marx repeats this point in Capital, Volume 1 (1867):

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:

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:

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.^[1]

Criticism

Marx believed that:

In other words, tradeable products do not all have a value because they can all be equated with sums of money, but because they are the products of social labour (cooperative labour producing things for others); consequently, such product-value exists quite independently of the use of money, and indeed independently of whether the products at any point in time happen to be traded or not (see also value-form). It is just that what the magnitude of that value is, can become apparent and visible only via the comparisons of trading ratios, when products are being bought and sold on a regular basis. Marx did not think there was anything particularly mysterious about the fact that people valued products because they had to spend time working to produce them, or to buy them. However, academics have made many objections to his idea.

Without referring explicitly to Marx's solution of the problems of the labour theory of value of David Ricardo, the marginal utility theorist William Stanley Jevons clearly stated the main criticism of the concept of abstract labour in his 1871 treatise:

Replying to this type of criticism, the Russian Marxist Isaak Illich Rubin argued that the concept of abstract labour was really much more complex than it seemed at first sight. He distinguished between "physically equal" labour; labour which is "socially equated" by means of consensual social evaluation or comparison; and labour efforts equated via the exchange of products using money as a universal equivalent http://marxists.catbull.com/archive/rubin/abstract-labour.htm.

To these three aspects we could add at least five others which are mentioned by Marx:

• the existence of normal labour-averages applying to different work tasks, which function as "labour norms" in any society;
• the gradation of many different labour efforts along one general, hierarchical dimension of worth, for the purpose of compensation;
• the universal exchangeability of labour efforts themselves, in a developed labour market;
• the general mobility of labour from one job or worksite to another; and
• the ability of the same workers to do all kinds of different jobs.

Some further aspects of the concept of abstract labour are provided by Marxian anthropologist Lawrence Krader in his works Labor and value and A treatise of social labor.

The conceptual issues associated with the concept of abstract labour have been one of the main reasons why many economists abandoned the labour theory of value. Possibly, these conceptual issues can be resolved, through a better empirical appreciation of the political economy of education, skills and the labour market. One problem with Marx's own theory is, that he never completed a book he intended to write on the subject of wages and the labour market (see Capital Vol. 1, Penguin edition, p. 683). Nevertheless Marx made quite clear his belief that capitalism "overturns all the legal or traditional barriers that would prevent it from buying this or that kind of labour-power as it sees fit, or from appropriating this or that kind of labour" (Ibid., p. 1013). Clearly, Marx believed that capitalist development itself would establish a normal commercial value for any kind of labour, and thus that all kinds of labour would be judged socially according to the same kind of evaluative standards of effort.

Recent discussion

In his book Crack Capitalism (Pluto Press, 2010), John Holloway (sociologist) considers abstract labour as the most radical foundational category of Marx's theory, and therefore he recommends the struggle against abstract labour as the centrepiece of the political struggle against capitalism.

Notes

References

• Karl Marx, Das Kapital.
• Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays in Marx's Theory of Value.
• Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century
• Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's 'Capital'.
• Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy.
• Makoto Itoh, The Basic Theory of Capitalism.
• Ulrich Krause, "Abstract Labour and Money". In H.D. Kurz, N. Salvadori (eds.): The Elgar Companion to Classical Economics, Edward Elgar, Cheltenham UK, 1998, 6-10.
• Ulrich Krause, Money and Abstract Labour : On the Analytical Foundations of Political Economy. Translated by Peter Burgess. Edited by Jon Rothschild. Verso.
• Jim Devine, "What Is 'Simple Labor": the Value-Creating Capacity of Skilled Labor", in: Capital & Class, #39 Winter 1989 http://myweb.lmu.edu/jdevine/JD-1989-SkilledLab.pdf
• Lawrence Krader, A treatise of social labor and Labor and value.
• Bertell Ollman, Social and sexual revolution. South End Press, 1979.
• Ben Fine, Labour Market Theory: A Constructive Reassessment. Routledge, London, 1998.
• Joyce Jacobsen and Gilbert Skillman, Labor Markets and Employment Relationships: A Comprehensive Approach. Wiley-Blackwell, 2004.
• Iain Morley and Colin Renfrew (eds.), The archaeology of measurement. Cambridge University Press, 2010.
• Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Worthy Efforts: Attitudes to Work and Workers in Pre-Industrial Europe. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2012.

See also

• Working time
• Law of value
• Value-form
• Labour theory of value
• Exchange value
• Socially necessary labour time
• Labour power

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