The Practical Truth of Abstract Labour - Chris Arthur

Arthur 14-Dec-12 36
conservation) of energy. 51 The consequence of the value-form is that
capital treats all labour as identical in its bearing on value and surplus-
value. But the further identification of this socially abstract universal (a
hypostatisation) with the empirical similarity of labours as expenditure of
energy is intended by Marx to bolster this imputation naturalistically. This
is unfortunate because it puts social determinations aside in favour of an
abstract materialism. The common characteristic of work as an
expenditure of energy is, as a category, ahistorical, unlike the practical
abstraction imposed by commodity exchange. 52 Of course the
universality of labour becomes evident only in modern capitalist society.
However, the identification of this universality with expenditure of energy
in the abstract is an ideological reduction of the productive potential of
labour to the level of a labour-power machine. But this fits beautifully
capital’s reflection of its own homogeneity into an equally homogeneous
ground, work in the physiological sense. 53
Conclusion
51 Wendling 2009, chapter 2. It should be added that there followed the reverse effect when the
physicists (e.g. Joule whose work was known to Marx and Engels) took from political economy the
category of ‘work’.
52 See Robles 2004.
53 For a robust assertion of the physiological definition of abstract labour complete with a measure in
calories, see Carchedi 2009, pp. 149-52. For any ‘embodied labour’ theory of value Carchedi’s instinct
that calories should be the real measure is correct; for energy expended could be properly considered
transferred (less waste) to the product. But Marx and Engels did not accept the reductivist
thermodynamic model of physiology (still less a measure in calories) because they were aware of the
bio-chemical aspects, it has been shown; see Burkett and Foster 2009, pp. 134-5.