The First Question Is...
These are that firstly you are equipped with a full understanding of the value your labour carries, secondly that the employing party holds no interests that would preclude him or her from fair exchange with you for the aforementioned labour and finally that no relationship exists between the employer and the wider levers of power.
It is possible with an understanding of this corner stone of Marxist thought to trace this influence into many modern socio-political movements such as BLM, Anti-Fa and the Corbynite wing of the Labour party and understand through this the vitriolic nature of modern political discourse and its heavy criticism – in some cases outright hostility – towards the Liberal Capitalist societies in which we have germinated our current way of life over the past three centuries. The format and development of which can itself be traced within the Declaration of Independence and American Constitution.
So you know. Nothing too heavy.
However not all is well in the land of Marx there are several anomalies within the concrete material world which make it hard to fully reconcile this grand narrative of exploitation with the day to day lives of working people in the twenty first century. But to enter this territory we must first condense the sprawling pages of Capital into a more easily digestible form.
This of course is no mean feat since Capital has spawned entire academic disciplines now over a century in the making however for the sake of brevity and discussion (let us not, of course forget sanity) here is a simplified version of Marx’s theory of value:
The value of a commodity is the sum total of both the socially necessary labour and the labour power put into the item being produced; which itself comes in two forms embodied and living labour.
Economists have a weird way of overcomplicating the most simple things. This much at the very least I have learnt. I’d trade this in for a theologian any day of the week. Lord knows Medieval Monks tell the odd fib but at least they had dramatic licence! Fear not. I’ll try to keep this as painless as possible.
First you may be asking yourself what socially necessary labour is. This is the number of labour hours it takes society, on average, to feed, clothe, and shelter a worker so that they are able to work. This means that the wage a worker receives depends partly on the number of labour hours it takes to sustain - or in Marx’s language create the conditions of subsistence for - a person who is fit to work.
Living labour is described by Marx as ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in the physical form, the living personality, of a human being, capabilities which he sets in motion whenever he produces a use-value of any kind.’ This put simply is the ability of yourself to transfer your time, energy and skills into converting raw materials to consumable products and is the alienated and commodified version of labour you sell to an employer through a contract.
These products themselves then much like a battery have stored up labour value which is then expended when consumed. Consumption in this conversation does not necessarily entail the material destruction of an object simply its application.
This is embodied labour, which itself is expended to create more products. It is the sum total of the living labour placed into the materials used to produce the end product i.e. a miner uses a pick which itself is made of wood and iron which had to be extracted and refined via labour into a tool for the purposes of realising the labour-power of the miner to extract ore who’s cost is cost of wood and iron turned into pick + cost of miners labour to extract ore so the raw material of iron ore has to contain within its price at point of sale all of the fractionated value of these elements.
These three forms of labour then form the basic value of the commodity produced. It is important however to acknowledge that value does not necessarily always equate to price but that is a discussion for another day.
This is a somewhat over simplified version however for the purposes of this article it will suffice. I highly recommend watching the following lecture if this is becoming rather difficult to follow: Marxian Economics Richard D Wolff
This explanation of labour may at first seem unrelated to whether or not we – the worker and consumer – have received a fair deal however I refer you now to the first presupposition made in the dismissal of Marx’s argument, that being that we negotiated a wage with our employer.
It is presumed that this negotiation is undertaken by two free agents within the separated sphere of the market where both employer and employee are negotiating for their own interests both equally free to end the negotiation and use the pathways of the market to enter another more favourable situation.
So far, so much classic economics; it seems like all Marx has done here is add a previously unacknowledged form of labour into this equation right?
Wrong. Here’s the punchline.
One of the two parties here holds an advantage.
This advantage is possession of the means of production.
But we’ll save that for part two; where we'll also take a dive into how this economic observation has had far reaching socio-political effects reaching through the 19th Century right into the current day.
As always I hope you're doing well, whatever it is you're doing, any feedback is appreciated.
Faithfully,
K.Marx, Capital:Volume 1, Penguin Classics, London, 1990
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