“If Capital is to be able to purse maximum profits, the labour power of human beings must be treated as a commodity, something to be exchanged, bought and sold solely on the criterion of whether or not a particular exchange increases the profit ratio of the enterprise concerned.”
“Labour power is an abstract property of human beings. It is their potential [viewed in economic terms] for producing value when placed within a work situation. For it to remain a [definitive] property of human beings [as it is under capitalism or the aristocracy of capital, which trumps the ‘authority of the Good’] it must be considered secondary to those properties that constitute human life [the various powers and capabilities that make for human nature and are the subject matter of ‘philosophical anthropology’]. If the labour power of humans is given precedence to those properties that constitute human social life, it is no longer a property of humans, for it has then become constitutive, a defining property, of its supplier. The labour power of a human being is not its defining or constitutive property: treating it as such dehumanises us literally. In treating it as such the economic arrangement of [otherwise moral] agents [i.e., persons] overshadows the arrangements of agents [persons] in a civil society. But when we live in an economy of organised under the aristocracy of Capital, our labour power must become our defining property on pain of failure of that economy.” — Michael Luntley (a professional philosopher*), from his invaluable but rather neglected book, The Meaning of Socialism (Open Court, 1990).
Some related terms in Marxism: abstract labor (which is not different from ‘concrete’ labor, thus being the same activity considered in its different aspects or from different perspectives); alienation; capital; commodity; exploitation; labor process; concrete or useful labor; labor theory of value (the meaning of this concept is highly contested, as we say, among Marxists, and I think Marx did in fact get some things wrong here; nevertheless, it contains important insights into the labor-value relation and thus we should not, with non-Marxists, be simply dismissive of the idea); use value; value (in exchange).
* Luntley states that his “main research interests are Wittgenstein; the metaphysics of thought and reasons; perceptual knowledge, especially the role perceptual knowledge plays in expert performance. One of the central themes of my book, Wittgenstein: Meaning and Judgment (Blackwell, 2003), is the idea that competence with language consists in seeing things aright, rather than being in possession of knowledge subject to a theoretical articulation. This work underpins some of my interests in the metaphysics of reasons. I am also interested in the philosophy of education, especially with regard to the nature of professional expertise and am investigating the scope for a detailed account of epistemic virtues - detailed cognitive skills by which experts of various kinds manage the complex environments with which they deal.”
I hope to share more material from his book at a later date.
Relevant bibliography: Marxism.
Images: (paintings) John Koenakeefe Mohl and Jacob Lawrence respectively. Click on the images to enlarge them.
Comments