The Revolutionary Ideas of Karl Marx by Alex Callinicos

Author:Alex Callinicos
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: non.fiction, economics
ISBN: 9781608461653
Publisher: Haymarket Books
Published: 1983-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

On the one hand, all labor is an expenditure of human labor power in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labor that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labor is an expenditure of human labor power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being definite useful labor that it produces use values (C i, 137).

Marx described this twofold character of labor as one of “the best points in my book” (SC, 192). It was here that Marx’s theory parted company with those of Ricardo and the political economists. Marx criticized Ricardo for focusing almost exclusively on trying to find a precise formula for determining the exchange value of commodities. They wanted, of course, to find ways of predicting market prices.

“Ricardo’s mistake is that he is concerned only with the magnitude of value. . . . What Ricardo does not investigate is the specific form in which labor manifests itself as the common element in commodities,” wrote Marx (TSV iii, 131, 138).

Marx was not specifically interested in market prices. His aim was to understand capitalism as a historically specific form of society, to find what made capitalism different from previous forms of society and what contradictions would lead to its future transformation. Marx wanted to know not how much labor formed the exchange value of commodities, but in what form labor performed this function and why under capitalism production was of commodities for the market rather than products for direct use as in previous societies.

The twofold character of labor is crucial in answering this question because labor is a social and cooperative activity. This is true not simply of particular sorts of work, but of society as a whole. The labor of each individual or group of individuals is social labor in the sense that it contributes to the needs of society. These needs require all sorts of different products—not simply various sorts of food, but also clothing, shelter, means of transport, the tools needed in production, and so on. This means that different sorts of useful labor have to be carried out. If everyone produced only one type of product, then society would soon collapse.

Every society therefore needs some means of distributing social labor among different productive activities. “This necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production,” Marx writes (SC, 209). But there is a fundamental difference between capitalism and other modes of production. Capitalism has no mechanism through which society can collectively decide how much of its labor will be devoted to particular tasks.

To understand why this is so, we must look at pre-capitalist modes of production, where the goal of economic activity was primarily the production of use values, and each community could meet all or most of its needs from the labor of its own members. Thus

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