From Marx to Hegel and Back by Fareld Victoria.;Kuch Hannes.;

Author:Fareld, Victoria.;Kuch, Hannes.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK

8

Abstract Labor and Recognition

Sven Ellmers

1 Introduction

Recent studies in Marx’s theory of value unanimously emphasize that abstract labor is a social quality of the products of labor. However, the meaning of ‘social’ remains quite ambiguous. In this chapter, I would like to show that Marx, too, already had distinct issues in mind when he underscored the social foundation of the substance of value: (i) its connection to socially necessary labor time, (ii) its connection to social needs, and (iii) the historicity of commodity-producing society. I think we ought to take Marx’s argument a step further. His theory of value would be more persuasive still if the aforementioned meanings of ‘social’ were complemented by yet another one: (iv) social recognition. In conclusion, I shall discuss if or to what extent this proposition might be substantiated by reflections on recognition in Marx’s Capital itself.

‘Abstract labor’ is already at first glance a key concept in Capital. Right at the beginning of his major work, Marx determines abstract labor as the “substance”1 of value, from which it follows that his entire theory of value and surplus value can only be developed through a more exact understanding of this substance. Marx emphasized its importance: the distinction between concrete and abstract labor is “crucial to an understanding of political economy”.2

Within traditional Marxism, the importance that Marx attributed to abstract labor for his entire project was rarely taken into consideration. In the popularizing summaries of Capital—such as those by Rosa Luxemburg or Karl Kautsky—the term is not mentioned at all.3 An awareness of the problem first arises with an interpretative approach that Ingo Elbe,4 following some of its protagonists, refers to as the neue Marx-Lektüre or New Reading of Marx: a discursive context, influenced by the unorthodox-dissident contributions from the early Soviet Union (Rubin, Rjazanov, Paschukanis) and French structuralism (Althusser, Balibar, Rancière), focused upon the scientific discoveries, but also ambivalences and blind alleys, of Marx’s critique of economy.

Since the middle of the 1960s, the scientific discussion—not just in Germany, but worldwide—could narrow down what Marx meant with the term ‘abstract labor’.5 Thus, contemporary Marx researchers are largely unanimous (i) in not equating abstract labor with mechanized, meaningless labor. In contrast to Hegel,6 abstract labor is not for Marx an antonym for sophisticated activities that are then referred to as ‘concrete labor’. The conceptual pair of ‘concrete/abstract labor’ does not indicate differing levels of qualification of labor, but rather two different facets of every type of commodity-producing labor: In its facet as a specific expenditure of labor-power to create useful objects, monotonous assembly line labor is just as much concrete labor as sophisticated, artisan activity; and in its facet of value creation, artisan activity is not qualitatively distinct from assembly line labor. They both count as expressions of abstract human labor. Furthermore, it is largely undisputed in the research (ii) that the abstraction from the concrete-useful side of labor is not to be understood as a mental abstraction on the part of economic actors who assert the validity in exchange of expended magnitudes of labor.

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