If then we leave out of consideration the use value of commodities, they have only one common property left, that of being products of labour. But even the product of labour itself has undergone a change in our hands. If we make abstraction from its use value, we make abstraction at the same time from the material elements and shapes that make the product a use value; we see in it no longer a table, a house, yarn, or any other useful thing. Its existence as a material thing is put out of sight. Neither can it any longer be regarded as the product of the labour of the joiner, the mason, the spinner, or of any other definite kind of productive labour.
^^^^ CB: Notice here Marx addresses Michael's issue of the doctor vs the teacher, i.e. different types of concrete labor. Marx's whole advance over Ricardo is that different types of concrete labor are abstracted from in abstract labor, and abstract labor is measured quantitatively by "duration" , i.e. time. There is no more fundamental concept in Marx's idea in _Capital_. No need to look at _The Poverty of Philosophy_ or the Grundisse. This concept is in _Capital_ Vol. I, Section 1, Commodities and Money, the mature Marx, the masterpiece, the final product of all that thinking: abstract labor is measured by time (smile) ^^^^ Along with the useful qualities of the products themselves, we put out of sight both the useful character of the various kinds of labour embodied in them, and the concrete forms of that labour; there is nothing left but what is common to them all; all are reduced to one and the same sort of labour, human labour in the abstract. 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
