The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour - Chris Arthur

Arthur 14-Dec-12 28
products of labour, the useful character of the kinds of labour
represented in them also disappears; this in turn entails the
disappearance of the different concrete forms of labour… all together
reduced to… labour in the abstract…. There is nothing left of them in
each case but the same spectral objectivity; they are merely blobs of
undifferentiated human labour.’ 37
This is presented as a purely logical requirement if value is to be
adequately grounded; but it raises the issue of the real meaning of
‘labour in the abstract’. In order to elucidate this Marx gives a number of
glosses.
a) The most well-known of these definitions is that given in terms of
physiology. This is already present in the 1859 Contribution to the
Critique of Political Economy. 38 In 1867 the same idea reappears
in Capital, where he says that, however different labours may be, it
is a physiological truth that they are essentially expenditure of
human brains, nerves, muscles, hands, etc. 39 In the second
edition there first appears the canonical definition: ‘On the one
hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the
physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or
abstract, human labour, that it forms [bildet] the value of
36 Other social determinants, such as organic composition of capital, also impose themselves in such a
way that an hour counts for more or less than other hours as value-positing. See Arthur 2005b.
37 Marx 1976b, p. 128, translation emended; Fowkes inserts illegitimately the word ‘quantities’; but the
discussion at this point is qualitative.