Paul Cockshott wrote: I feel that John is over complicating the idea of abstract social labour. I understand it to be labour which society could potentially dispose of in any branch of production, but which at any given point in time must have a particular concreted allocation into different productive activities. As abstract social labour it is a fraction of the total working day of society. In these terms, money and prices are irrelevant, since the concept of abstract social labour refers to a deeper reality than that revealed in prices. Abstract social labour is a category that goes beyond capitalist production. A communist society would have abstract social labour as well, and would calculate its costs directly in these terms. It is true that it is in prices that the law of value actually reveals itself to the participants of a capitalist economy, but the underlying reality is that any society must carry out an appropriate distribution of its social labour. Thus the conceptual category can not depend on prices, and its dimension of measurement can not refer to price, but only to time. _________________________ This is much better, but still has a serious problem. In Marx's analysis of capitalism you cannot take the total social labour ot the "total working day " of society as given. The length of the working day or the total social labour is determined by the class-struggle. This is the basis of my basic point that the whole attempt to conceptualise Marx's value in the framework of *allocation* of given social labour would invariably get into trouble. You have to first introduce the class-struggle and so the production of surplus. Thus the only problematic in which the concept of value in Marx can be understood is the *surplus approach problematic*. Cheers, ajit sinha
