Marx realized that all workers did not bring the same amount of abstract labor to the table. Unskilled workers can and do shift from job to job, but not all workers can substitute for one another. If that were the case, Marx could have just wrote of work hours. Time may be money, but your time and mine might not command the same amount of money because of differing levels of skills.
Michael Nuwer wrote: 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. > > 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 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Chico, CA 95929 530-898-5321 fax 530-898-5901 www.michaelperelman.wordpress.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
