The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour - Chris Arthur

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Arthur 14-Dec-12 22 redrawing, is a precondition of capitalist production. It depends on a concretely universal form of labour able to transfer easily between different occupations and tasks, unconstrained by natural scarcity of talent, or social barriers to mobility. It may well be that the concrete universality of social labour is a necessary precondition for the positing of abstract labour but it is not to be identified with it. 30 Now there is a paradox in that the practical truth of ‘abstract labour’ is realised only as a social totality of labours, but this social labour never exists immediately, because the totalisation is effected by capital, which reduces concrete labours to moments of its totalising drive. Time and the Concept In the collective worker the material differences are absorbed in the whole, and this reflects back on the labour process so as to posit it virtually as a universal production process carried out by undifferentiated human labour. Yet the sum of labours making up the collectivity seems a false aggregate because it really exists only as a material combination of detailed labours, not just one type of labour defined by the product. While such concrete labours cannot be aggregated in any meaningful 30 See Arthur 1979.
Arthur 14-Dec-12 23 way, capital makes this senseless aggregation ideally; and it does so under the aspect of time only, because it needs to get the commodities out as quickly as possible. Since labour is necessary to produce what has value, capital must time it, because that is datum in its competition with other capitals; capital not only imposes the qualitative reduction of ‘labour’ to motion, but its quantitative reduction to time of production as a determinant of magnitude of value. The real question is how and why it is relevant to abstract from all the features of this collective worker the one dimension of time. Why time? Marx gives a wrong answer when he observes in the Grundrisse that ‘all economy is … economy of time’. 31 This is so only from our modern perspective in which ‘Time is Money’. In pre-capitalist society time was not an issue, precisely because it cost nothing (and in any case it was dictated by natural cycles). As for post-capitalist economy: it is clear now that economising on scarce resources will be prioritised over economy of time, even were that to be time for the free development of the individual. Time cannot ‘produce’ anything of course; but it counts in crystallised form as the value substance, once the produced commodity is granted the form-determination of valorised-value. 32 The only possible dimension of the valorisation process is the time it takes. It is not at all obvious that 31 Marx and Engels 1986, p. 109.
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Page 3 and 4: Arthur 14-Dec-12 3 specific histori
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Page 7 and 8: Arthur 14-Dec-12 7 The question is
Page 9 and 10: Arthur 14-Dec-12 9 But first I will
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Page 13 and 14: Arthur 14-Dec-12 13 ground of valor
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Page 17 and 18: Arthur 14-Dec-12 17 value, the livi
Page 19 and 20: Arthur 14-Dec-12 19 Also, it is nec
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Page 27 and 28: Arthur 14-Dec-12 27 The naturalisti
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Page 31 and 32: Arthur 14-Dec-12 31 its productive
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Page 37 and 38: Arthur 14-Dec-12 37 We have argued
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The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour - Chris Arthur

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