ASSIGNMENT - Ramengmawia Bawitlung, CISLS. Critically examine the concepts of and relationship between abstract labour, alienation, and surplus value ??
ABSTRACT LABOUR
The theory of abstract labour is one of the central points of Marx’s theory of value. That abstract labour ‘creates’ value, it is the ‘content’, or ‘substance’ of value. Marx’s task was not to reduce value analytically to abstract labour, but to derive value dialectically from abstract value. In Marx’s system, the concept of abstract labour is inseperably related to the basic characteristics of the commodity economy, in which he distinguishes two sides; the material technical and the social (i.e. use value and value). Similar two sides are distinguished by Marx in the labour embodied in commodities; concrete labour, which is material-technical and abstract labour, which is the social side of this labour embodied in commodities. …show more content…
Marx says of this alienation that ‘the worker is relate to the product of his labour as to an alien object’.
Activity alienation; where the activity of work itself is alienating because it is involuntary and fails to develop a worker’s creative potential. Marx says of this alienation that ‘it is forced labour…. that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague’.
Species alienation; where as a result of product and activity alienation, workers become alienated from their essential nature, what makes them human. Marx says of this alienation that ‘ in tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from
ABSTRACT LABOUR
The theory of abstract labour is one of the central points of Marx’s theory of value. That abstract labour ‘creates’ value, it is the ‘content’, or ‘substance’ of value. Marx’s task was not to reduce value analytically to abstract labour, but to derive value dialectically from abstract value. In Marx’s system, the concept of abstract labour is inseperably related to the basic characteristics of the commodity economy, in which he distinguishes two sides; the material technical and the social (i.e. use value and value). Similar two sides are distinguished by Marx in the labour embodied in commodities; concrete labour, which is material-technical and abstract labour, which is the social side of this labour embodied in commodities. …show more content…
Marx says of this alienation that ‘the worker is relate to the product of his labour as to an alien object’.
Activity alienation; where the activity of work itself is alienating because it is involuntary and fails to develop a worker’s creative potential. Marx says of this alienation that ‘it is forced labour…. that as soon as no physical or other compulsion exists, labour is shunned like the plague’.
Species alienation; where as a result of product and activity alienation, workers become alienated from their essential nature, what makes them human. Marx says of this alienation that ‘ in tearing away from man the object of his production, therefore, estranged labour tears from him his species life, his real objectivity as a member of the species and transforms his advantage over animals into the disadvantage that his inorganic body, nature, is taken from