A Word of Work #4
aside: on concrete and abstract labour
This is a brief aside from the ongoing reading of Guattari and Negri’s Communists Like Us in this series. It touches on some connected ideas - again, a reminder that this is a 'work in progress’ series, trying to think through the concept of work.
I was interested in an article by Andrew Kliman theorising and imagining a post-capitalist society – take a peek over here. I agree with the emphasis Kliman has on the problem of labour, abstract labour in particular. At the end of the piece they point out the implication – “So one of the most fundamental tasks we face today, I believe, is to work out how to create the social conditions such that each hour of labor will really count as equal – beginning on the day after the revolution”.
How exactly does a system of equal concrete labour value work. In this regard I think it is worth looking to some of the experiences of people living together and trying to forge models that work. For example, this article about the Twin Oaks community in the US has some interesting hints at the concrete practical experiments done to create an equal labour model.
There’s no getting away from the fact that when talking about communism one of the first questions that arises, once you get beyond complete rejection, is ‘how will it work’ and often the responses seem unsatisfactory. It’s interesting to note, of course, how the Twin Oaks model uses B.F.Skinner as a theoretical background.
So on the one hand we might suggest that the commune is the space in which the problem of concrete labour will be solved. Concrete labour needs to be a human relation, a direct relation to the people and needs that make up our lives. On the other hand it seems like you can’t simply abolish abstract labour.
In a comment to the Kliman article by Mike Macnair he suggests that, so far, capitalism has not fully socialised labour. This implies that the transition to the post-capitalist situation will have to deal with the fact that “substantial parts of the productive economy and larger amounts of indispensable information and skills remain *actually* controlled by petty proprietors (family farmers, small businesses, techies, managers, bureaucrats, etc)”. To the extent that there is specialisation and ‘expertise’ or ‘control’ that depends upon the specific concrete individual the socialisation of labour that is central to capitalism is incomplete.
The paradox is that this specialisation is a remnant of concrete labour within capitalism. It’s value is not wholly governed by the laws of abstract labour, which is abstract precisely because it is given value on the criteria of ‘socially necessary labour time’. Rather it’s value depends upon the concrete individual who possesses the specialised knowledge (skill) or means of production, the two often intertwined inextricably. This intertwining is apparent in the way in which production depends upon a degree of knowledge, of skill or attunement.
It’s not hard to conceive this entwinement, we simply have to think about the idea of the person who is ‘indispensable’. To be an indispensable worker is to be a concrete worker and the realities of this can be quite complex, which is one of the reasons why a whole range of activities require apprenticeship as a mode of entry rather than simple qualification. This presents a problem in so far as the social product of the specialised concrete worker is under individual control and as such can be used to, put crudely, ‘extort’ extra value from society. Within the realm of the law of the value-form this is of course a mode of resistance but only because it is a mode of resistance to the social as it stands. When the very form of the social is in transition, how would that society deal with this particular type of concrete labour, since it cannot simply repress it, not least because the very goal of the new society is to enable labour to become concrete once more rather than abstract. The tension lies between the need to return labour to being concrete value and at the same time socially organising the satisfaction of need through a ‘social distribution of labour products’.
To that extent Macnair is right to point to the problems of the incomplete socialisation of labour under currently existing capitalism. Whilst the former task (implementing concrete labour, without which equal social relations seem inconceivable) might require the commune as its mode of reality (“The commune is the elementary unit of resistance reality“) the latter task (implementing socially distributed labour products) points to the problem of the wider organism within which those communes operate. We can imagine local communisms quite easily, as communes suggest, the difficulty is in imagining the interactions between the ‘cells’ of the new society. Here the great problem, it seems, is in replacing one type of cell (commodity) with the other (commune) as the ground of the new organism (communism).
Commodities have their mode of interaction and unification in their essence; it works without us and beyond us. That’s a material model, no need for ideas to operate at all. In a model of a post-capitalist society it seems like the problem is in finding this type of material connection between the cells of the new society, the new organism, the market being a ‘solution’ only in so far as it’s possible to resist the return of exchange value, a possibility that seems quite difficult to conceptualise precisely because ‘the market’ (as a global form) brings back, or at least allows back in, abstract labour. If we rely upon some sort of idea (do the right thing, be nice) then a moral code of sacrifice is in effect the solution being proposed, a model that is fundamentally problematic, not only because of it’s religious roots but also because of its tension with the goal of freedom.
The advantage capitalism had is that no-one ever deliberately tried to create it. It simply grew. This is one of the reasons, I would argue, that the model of the organism is so central to the way in which Marx poses the value-form and its universalisation. The problem of communism, one posed most acutely in the problem of the immediate post-capitalist moment, is that it is the first time a conscious attempt to form society on a positive, human basis is attempted. Marx recognises that material genesis of capitalism as rooted in the productive relations, yet the standard model of communism is its implementation through a political genesis and this is to invert the materialist framework. Yet the fact that communism is to be a conscious human society suggests that this is a necessary fact, not a contingent one. Communism doesn’t simply grow into being, unbless you’re happy to rest on a crude economic determinism which allows no reality to the political. Communism has to be created. The problem is that while it may be a necessary condition that communism has to be created through a political act it is plainly not a sufficient one as well. Whilst the necessary conditions of communism and a post-capitalist society are political, what exactly are the sufficient conditions?
The idea that capitalism needs to fully socialise labour is intended to indicate the underlying way in which labour is constituted within capitalism. Here the distinction that is important is between concrete and abstract labour. We can see this distinction in considering how much time it might take to do something. Concrete labour is the amount of time it actually takes a particular individual to do some job X. We sometimes use this idea intuitively when we say something like ‘it takes such-and-such time to do a job’ or ask the question, ‘how long can it take’ to do something, the latter question often asked with a kind of sarcasm when we encounter someone taking longer than we imagine necessary for something. Let’s use a specific example – mowing the lawn. Abstract labour is the amount of time it theoretically takes to mow the lawn. Each individual mows at a different speed. If we took a range of such individuals and averaged out the amount of time each took to mow the lawn we might say that this average is the ‘abstract labour time’ involved in mowing the lawn as distinct from the ‘concrete labour time’ an individual takes. Some people will be faster, some slower but there is supposedly some amount of time ‘it takes’.
Now with this distinction in mind we then need to add the concept of the commodity as Marx develops it in his work, the commodity being the basic cell form of capitalism. One of the central commodities is, of course, labour, bought by the capitalist as part of the production process. Except it’s not concrete labour the capitalist buys but abstract labour, this abstract labour often being called ‘labour power’. The capitalist doesn’t pay me to do a job in my own way but simply to do a job and they pay based on an estimate of the labour power that ‘it takes’ to do the job. This is easy to see if we simply consider two workers mowing the lawn. Worker X moves slowly, is perhaps a perfectionist, mows the lawn spectacularly well and with great care but takes 8 hours to do it. Worker B does the job effectively, although there may be the odd scrape, and takes one hour. Now the rate of pay is £5 per hour. It seems ‘unfair’ to us that worker A would get £40 for the ‘same job’ that worker B gets £5 for. We might defend the difference in terms of quality or some other criteria, but we have problems quantifying the realm of the qualitative, and wages are basically quantities paid for quantities. The quantity that is paid for is ‘labour power’. We quantify labour power by the amount of time ‘it takes’ to do the job and in Marx this is called ‘socially necessary labour time’ (SNLT).
Now the crux here, sorry to be long-winded, is that SNLT is an abstract amount of labour, the quantity of which is determined by the social. The question of why it is determined by the social I will come onto in a moment. If, however, the amount of labour power is quantified by the social in the form of SNLT then it is socialised labour, rather than concrete labour. The more we can socialise labour, the more we can give it a fixed quantitative measurement and remove qualitative concerns, the more efficiently capitalism can operate. Why is this? If we can fully quantify labour power then we can fully cost it. If, however, we have to maintain some qualitative aspect then the costing will be an estimate and any estimate is risky. We may over-estimate the cost and lose profit (‘pay too high a wage’)or we may under-estimate the cost and perhaps make good profits for a while but produce some other problem, such as lack of long term sustainability (‘fail to pay for social costs’).
The role of ‘innovation’ is understood by understanding why labour power is quantified by SNLT. Marx argues, that “The value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of the labourer.” (Capital, Vol 1, Chapter 6). At a bare minimum we might say that the amount necessary for the maintenance of the worker is simply some subsistence level amount of food, shelter etc. That would be to reduce the value, however, to the physically necessary labour time, something that Marx does seem to do at times. Now, the labour power has to be reproduced, a supply must be kept constantly available on pain of halting production and hence profit. It alkso has to be reproduced in the actual social world not just in some abstract ‘physical’ world and because of this ‘socially necessary’ becomes quite opaque.
The SNLT is determined by how much time ‘it takes’ the average worker to do a job, but includes the amount it takes to reproduce the average worker and this will include the costs of maintaining their role as a worker, their willingness and capacity to work and a whole range of other things. In this situation there is a degree of estimation, vagueness, latent in the system until capitalism has fully socialised labour (fully quantified it). It is this latent vagueness that opens the door for innovation. In effect, innovation occurs when someone finds a way of under-estimating the SNLT involved in a product, old or new, and extracting a high degree of profit. Once the innovation has occurred, however, and a ‘new source of profit’ is found by one person, then others follow. As more people follow, so the actual costs involved in the product will become better estimated (for example, perhaps the social will regulate business practices it sees as destructive, perhaps the cost of the product will drop as amass production drives down the end price). As cost become better estimated the original innovation will return a lower rate of profit than it did at first and eventually maintain a profit at the lower rate or disappear as the estimated costs show the product to actually be unviable. Innovation is, in this model, a result of (a) the drive for higher rates of profit and (b) the under estimation of the social costs (SNLT) of the product. It is inspired by the minds of individuals taking advantage of possibilities offered by the system.
