me:
>> strictly speaking, labor (effort) can't be measured at all.
Doyle Saylor wrote:
> That I think too broad a statement.
Put it this way: each worker is different from all others ("we're all
individuals" -- MP) so that each amount of effort is different. Each
also differs because the situation the work is being done in is
different from all others. Because of this, any effort to measure work
does not apply in other situations. Each "unit" of concrete labor is
unique.
Now, there is something behind all of those measures: Marx's abstract
labor represents the shared characteristics of all of the diverse
efforts done at the same time. It's the using up of labor-power
(individual capacities).
Capitalists try to pin down something a lot like abstract labor ("how
much effort is worker X putting in?") But actually measuring that is
more a matter of struggle than simple measurement, because people have
this damned proclivity to act like human beings and not like
silkworms. (It's not like Taylor's experiments.) After all, playing
solitaire on one's PC (or contributing to pen-l) looks a lot like
"effort" if the bosses' technology is inadequate. Even with good
technology -- and the banning of solitaire and pen-l from PCs --
there's a problem: a little bit of solitaire or pen-l may raise
over-all effort. This is why pure Taylorism is usually rejected in
favor of management systems that bring in the need to convince workers
to identify management's goals as their own.
Taylorism (deskilling of work) does may concrete labors more like
abstract labor. With jobs being more and more similar, that makes
people's labor-power and labor-effort more and more interchangeable.
However, there are counteracting influences, such as (possibly) the
education system and the invention of new skills.
To Marx, abstract labor corresponded to value. But in the real world,
values do not correspond to prices. If we can calculate prices of
production (the hypothetical prices where profit rates are equalized
among sectors), we could then use an input-output table to calculate
the abstract labor done in each sector. But then those calculations
would be for highly aggregated sectors, not for individual workers.
Abstract labor is a theoretical abstraction that helps us understand
the world, especially since capitalism itself acts as if it were
trying to reduce all of the concrete labors to abstract labor.
--
Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own
way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante.
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