Labour is a category that goes back as far as human production itself. Indeed, as Marx sets out in Capital III, it is not some specific kind of labour, such as wage labour, that is the creator of new value, but free labour sui generis. Yet, the abstract category labour takes numerous forms throughout history from that of the members of the primitive commune, to slave and serf labour, corvee labour, peasant and artisan labour through to modern wage labour.
“Nevertheless “labour” in this simplicity is economically considered just as modern a category as the relations which give rise to this simple abstraction. The Monetary System, for example, still regards wealth quite objectively as a thing existing independently in the shape of money. Compared with this standpoint, it was a substantial advance when the Manufacturing or Mercantile System transferred the source of wealth from the object to the subjective activity – mercantile or industrial labour – but it still considered that only this circumscribed activity itself produced money.” (p 209)
The Monetary System believed that there was something intrinsic to money, in the form of gold and silver, as the basis of wealth, and so, having more of it was the goal, however achieved. As Marx says, the Mercantilists were an advance on this, because, although they still placed this emphasis on these stores of money, they saw the basis of creating them being via trade, an excess of exports over imports, and so the labour that made that possible being the foundation of national wealth. As Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, it is not surprising that these ideas become prominent in the leading mercantile nations of the time – Netherlands and Britain.
By contrast, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value, France, whose development relied far more on its own production, particularly in agriculture, developed the ideas of Physiocracy, to determine the type of labour that creates wealth.
“... the Physiocrats assume that a specific form of labour – agriculture – creates wealth, and they see the object no longer in the guise of money, but as a product in general, as the universal result of labour. In accordance with the still circumscribed activity, the product remains a naturally developed product, an agricultural product, a product of the land par excellence.” (p 209)
And, similarly, it is no surprise that it is when Britain has moved beyond its Mercantilist period, and become a manufacturing nation, that Adam Smith takes these ideas of the Physiocrats, about value being created by labour, in production, and extends them beyond agriculture, to include all labour engaged in production.
“It was an immense advance when Adam Smith rejected all restrictions with regard to the activity that produces wealth – for him it was labour as such, neither manufacturing, nor commercial, nor agricultural labour, but all types of labour. The abstract universality which creates wealth implies also the universality of the objects defined as wealth: they are products as such, or once more labour as such, but in this case past, materialised labour. How difficult and immense a transition this was is demonstrated by the fact that Adam Smith himself occasionally relapses once more into the Physiocratic system. It might seem that in this way merely an abstract expression was found for the simplest and most ancient relation in which human beings act as producers – irrespective of the type of society they live in.” (p 209)
But, the concept that it is labour, in the abstract, rather than any specific kind of labour, is itself only possible when society has developed to a very complex level. If we take a primitive commune, its wealth very directly depends not on labour in the abstract, but on real concrete labour. It depends on the skill of its hunters, farmers, cattle breeders and so on. Indeed, leap forward to capitalist production, and the wealth of a nation, though it derives from the value created by abstract labour, itself depends upon a specific form of labour – wage labour. In other words, it depends on an economy in which large-scale industrial capital exploits vast quantities of wage labour. Such an economy may also have large numbers of peasants, and petty-producers, self-employed labourers, and so on, but, contrary to the small business myth, purveyed by liberals, it is not these types of labour that create the wealth of the nation, but large-scale wage labour.
“This abstraction of labour is, on the other hand, by no means simply the conceptual resultant of a variety of concrete types of labour. The fact that the particular kind of labour employed is immaterial is appropriate to a form of society in which individuals easily pass from one type of labour to another, the particular type of labour being accidental to them and therefore irrelevant. Labour, not only as a category but in reality, has become a means to create wealth in general, and has ceased to be tied as an attribute to a particular individual.” (p 210)
Marx says that, at that time, this condition only applied in the most modern bourgeois society, the United States, and so,
“The abstract category “labour,” “labour as such,” labour sans phrase, the point of departure of modern economics, thus becomes a practical fact only there. The simplest abstraction, which plays a decisive role in modern political economy, an abstraction which expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations, nevertheless appears to be actually true in this abstract form only as a category of the most modern society.” (p 210)
No comments:
Post a Comment