Concrete and Abstract Labor
Concrete Labor |
Marx
says that for x amount of commodity A to be exchanged for y amount of commodity
B, they must have something in common and this he calls value. He further argues
that what commodities have in common is that they are all products of
labor...thus labor is the key to value.
However, labor comes in two forms, "concrete" and
"abstract." We can consider labor concretely: that is in terms of what
is special to it. We can consider it abstractly: that is, what is common
to all forms of labor. These are not really two different sorts of labor,
but two ways of looking at any sort of labor.
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Value, for Marx, is associated with abstract labor and how much value an
object has is associated with amount of abstract labor necessary to produce it
(at a certain place and time). More accurately, the magnitude of value is
the socially necessary abstract labor used to produce it. Socially necessary
means "under the conditions of production normal in that society"
money
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