{"title":"2. Abstract Labour as a Historical Reality","authors":"E. Screpanti","doi":"10.11647/obp.0182.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0182.02","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":367182,"journal":{"name":"Labour and Value","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116879736","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusions: Rethinking Exploitation","authors":"E. Screpanti","doi":"10.11647/obp.0182.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0182.06","url":null,"abstract":"The explanation of exploitation constitutes the core of Marx’s economic theory. It is his most innovative contribution to the science of capitalism. Better than any other socialist thinker, Marx helps us understand the institutions and social relations that form the mechanisms through which capitalism extracts surplus value from the labour activity of wageworkers. However, the edifice of his theory is not devoid of some clumsiness, for example, in his account of the employment contract, as well as the notions of abstract labour and labour value. Marx elaborates two different theories of the employment relationship. The first describes it as an agreement for the sale of a commodity, whereby workers cede the use value of labour power, i.e. a flow of living labour springing from a stock of labour power. This commodity seems to be a natural abstraction with the properties of a productive force. Exploitation occurs when the exchange value of labour power is lower than its value-creating capacity. In the second theory, the employment relationship is explained as a transaction establishing workers’ subordination to capitalists and the subsumption of their productive capacity under capital. While the former theory is subject to criticisms of moralism, essentialism and naturalism, the latter is not, and is able to sustain a consistent and realistic account of capitalist exploitation. This ambivalence of Marx originates from his Hegelian and Ricardian heritage, although both Hegel and Ricardo contributed in a positive way to the formation of his science. On the negative side, Hegel bequeathed","PeriodicalId":367182,"journal":{"name":"Labour and Value","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133501795","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"3. Labour Subsumption and Exploitation","authors":"E. Screpanti","doi":"10.11647/obp.0182.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0182.03","url":null,"abstract":"A scientific theory of capitalist exploitation aims to causally explain the production of surplus value. Marx develops this theory in volume 1 of Capital, especially parts 3–5, which are devoted to elucidating the effects of capitalist control of the labour process, and parts 6–7, devoted to explaining the dynamics of wage determination. In fact, most of the volume deals with the social, technological and organizational conditions of exploitation. The theory of labour subordination and subsumption is not yet an explanation of exploitation. It is a theory of the capitalists’ power. It becomes the essential part of a proper explanation of exploitation through reconstruction: firstly, of the way in which that power is used in managing a factory1 and, secondly, of the way wages are fixed. Marx’s reasoning in parts 3–5 reveals that concrete commodities are the products that workers actually create in the labour process. A","PeriodicalId":367182,"journal":{"name":"Labour and Value","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115279089","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"5. Measures of Exploitation","authors":"E. Screpanti","doi":"10.11647/obp.0182.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0182.05","url":null,"abstract":"Marx’s value theory is a complex doctrine in which three different kinds of speculation coalesce: a philosophy aimed at proving that value is created by a labour substance; an explanation of the social relations of production in capitalism; and a method for measuring exploitation. My opinion is that there is no need for an essentialist philosophy to determine value, no need for a theory of value to explain capitalist social relations, and no need for a labour theory of value to measure the rate of surplus value. All we really need is a theory of production prices, possibly evaluated in labour units, as an instrument to measure exploitation. In the present chapter, I firstly bring to light some conundrums caused by using a wrong standard, then I show how to express the rate of surplus labour with a correct standard. In section 1, I illustrate two paradoxes ensuing from the labour theory of value. One of them muddles up the explanation of technical change. In short, the labour theory of value is unable to account for the process of technical change in a capitalist economy precisely because it is a purely “technicist” theory of value. The second paradox deranges the equal exchange doctrine. This seems to be postulated by Marx to argue that fundamental capitalist exploitation occurs in the production process and not in the circulation process. Yet, if equal exchange is defined in labour values, there may be cases in which a part of surplus value emerges from the circulation process. In section 2, I propose giving up the labour theory of value and sticking with a single system approach. Surplus value and the rate of exploitation can be measured in labour units by normalizing prices","PeriodicalId":367182,"journal":{"name":"Labour and Value","volume":"52 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123323577","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"1. Abstract Labour as a Natural Substance","authors":"E. Screpanti","doi":"10.11647/obp.0182.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0182.01","url":null,"abstract":"ion based on “commodity production in general”. Meanwhile, note that this approach defines the real abstraction of labour by reducing social activity to commodity exchange (Sohn-Rethel 1978, 20, 26; Toscano 2008, 281), and it determines value as a generic variable pertaining to the reproducibility of commodities (Ahumada 2012, 844). Within this level of analysis, Marx delves into another procedure of abstraction; one that is substantive rather than methodological. The exchange value of commodities does not depend on the concreteness of their use values. Thus, labour as its substance cannot consist of concrete labour. Yet it cannot be a merely conceptual abstraction. Since value is an objective reality, the labour that creates it must also be a real abstraction. Abstract labour so defined is a value-creating substance in that it is a productive force. Productive labour in general (Starosta 2008, 28) is the sole productive force that produces new value: If the special productive labour of the workman were not spinning, he could not convert the cotton into yarn, and therefore could not transfer the values of the cotton and spindle to the yarn. Suppose the same workman were to change his occupation to that of a joiner, he would still by a day’s labour add value to the material he works upon. Consequently, we see, first, that the addition of new value takes place not by virtue of his labour being spinning in particular, or joinering in particular, but because it is labour in the abstract, a portion of the total labour of society; and we see next, that the value added is of a given definite amount, not because his labour has a special utility, but because it is exerted for a definite time. On the other hand, then, it is by virtue of its general character, as being expenditure of human labour power in the abstract, that spinning adds new value (Marx 1996, 210–1). Thus, abstract labour is defined by ignoring the specific qualities of the workers’ labour activities, their skills, competencies, and performances. It is seen as a purely quantitative magnitude. Concrete labours are accordingly characterised in qualitative terms. They differ in various aspects, which can be reduced to three dimensions: (1) differences in the kinds of competencies (e. g., between those of a carpenter and those of a bricklayer), (2) differences in the complexity of competencies (e. g., between those of a bricklayer and those of an architect), and (3) differences in the degrees of performance efficiency (e. g., between the work a of carpenter who produces a table in one day and that of a carpenter who produces one in two days).","PeriodicalId":367182,"journal":{"name":"Labour and Value","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126447067","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"4. Values and Prices","authors":"E. Screpanti","doi":"10.11647/obp.0182.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.11647/obp.0182.04","url":null,"abstract":"After part 1, in which Marx develops a philosophy of “labour value”, he uses this notion as a measure of surplus value and the rate of exploitation throughout the remainder of Capital, volume 1. Abstract labour is the substance of value, according to the labour theory of value. However, the expression “abstract labour” almost disappears outside part 1 or, rather, it appears mainly in the notion of “labour time”, as it must when the labour hour is used as a unit of measurement.1 The real scientific problem addressed by Marx in Capital is bringing to light the social relations of production through which surplus value is extracted. The theory of value serves to provide a measurement tool capable of highlighting those relations, and Marx believes that embodied labour has this property. In section 1 of the present chapter, I illustrate the labour theory of value in the simplest way possible.2 I describe an economy in which perfect competition and constant returns to scale prevail, and in which there are no scarce resources, no fixed capital, no joint production, no luxury goods, no complex labour and no growth. These simplifying hypotheses are assumed not just to make the text accessible to a broad","PeriodicalId":367182,"journal":{"name":"Labour and Value","volume":"37 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133900882","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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