michael a. lebowitz wrote:
Note how entranced Marx was with Ricardo at that time as evidenced in
this text. This is a Ricardian concept--- a far cry from the Marx who
said the most important new thing in Capital was the distinction between
abstract and concrete labour.
michael
Michael,
If you have the time and desire, would you be willing to elaborate? I was thinking
that the clause "one man during an hour is worth just as much as another man
during an hour" contains a hint about Marx's early thinking on abstract labor and
its relationship to abstract time. I see some continuity between this clause and
the following passage from the Introduction to the Grundrisse:
"Indifference towards specific labours corresponds to a form of society in which
individuals can with ease transfer from one labour to another, and where the
specific kind is a matter of chance for them, hence of indifference. Not only the
category, labour, but labour in reality has here become the means of creating
wealth in general, and has ceased to be organically linked with particular
individuals in any specific form. Such a state of affairs is at its most developed
in the most modern form of existence of bourgeois society – in the United States.
Here, then, for the first time, the point of departure of modern economics, namely
the abstraction of the category ‘labour’, ‘labour as such’, labour pure and
simple, becomes true in practice."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch01.htm
I am following writers like Rubin, Murray and Colletti who maintain that abstract
labor is identical to alienated labor. Following this line, a modern society which
believes that "time is money" is a society dominated by abstract labor.
Regards,
Michael
On 12/08/2008 1:46 PM, Michael Nuwer wrote:
"the pendulum of the clock has become as accurate a measure of the
relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two
locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man's hour is worth
another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth
just as much as another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is
nothing." [The Poverty of Philosophy]
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/poverty-philosophy/ch01b.htm
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