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To: "Progressive Economics" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: RE: [Pen-l] Re: The Irrelevance of Workers In Economic Theory From: "Perelman, Michael" 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. ^^^^ CB: Yes, Marx recognizes different levels of skill. Labor power is a commodity in capitalist relations of production. A main distinguishing characteristic of capitalism is that labor power becomes a commodity - wage labor. Different levels of skilled labor have different amounts of value added to the labor power, i.e. have different values. That's the definition of different levels of skill. So, different levels of skill in labor add different amounts of value per time to the commodity they produce. But holding skill level constant, labor added to a commodity is measured by time in the Marxist paradigm. I think Marx considered that he had solved a paradox in the Ricardian scheme which didn't differentiate between abstract and concrete labor. This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
