Labor Essay ⋆ Sociology Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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In The German Ideology, Marx and Engels maintained that one may distinguish humans from other biological entities by consciousness, religion, or anything else one chooses but humankind fundamentally differentiated itself from other organisms when it began to produce its means of life through labor. Labor is an eternal, naturally imposed condition, common to all societies. While producing its means of life, humankind indirectly creates the material conditions for its ongoing existence.

In Capital, Marx (1976: 283) emphasized the onto-logical status of ”labor in general. Labor is ”a process between man and nature . . . a process by which man, through his own actions, mediates, regulates and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. Labor changes nature and changes humankind s nature. Ensuing scholarship in the physical, biological, and social sciences have refined, but not fundamentally altered, Marx s position on labor s ontological character.

Humankind is directly part of the material order of nature and inescapably bound to its laws (e.g., gravity, mitosis and meiosis, aging). As living creatures, humans have specific material needs they must meet (e.g., they must metabolize oxygen, water, and protein to live). Those needs are not all met immediately and directly. Through the evolution of the material order, the human order stands separated or alienated from the material order. Whereas the material order of nature is direct, concrete, and thingly, the human order is concurrently immediate and mediate, concrete and abstract, and objective and subjective. Labor in general is the activity through which humankind mediates itself with the material order and draws upon the concrete and abstract aspects of its being to create and recreate its existence.

Marx s critique of Hegel s Phenomenology led to his deepest and most perceptive analyses of labor as the material, ontological basis to human life. While Hegel correctly emphasized the creative aspects of humanity, he limited it to the active, self-conscious mind. Marx maintained that human self-development stemmed from labor – a form of action that was simultaneously concrete and abstract. Labor externalizes an idea in a material form; it creates something that is separate from the producer. This object stands opposite and outside the producer but simultaneously remains a part of the producer as it represents the culmination of creative activity. Twenty-three years later, in Capital, Marx celebrated labor as the fire that infuses energy into raw materials, tools, and machinery, turning them from moribund objects into new products to meet human needs and wants.

Subject to the laws of the material order, labor is simultaneously objective and subjective: in producing an object through the externalization of an idea, the producer also gains subjective knowledge associated with that productive act. Labor is an inescapably creative, concrete process. The labor process crosses through the cultural grid humankind creates and recreates between itself and the natural order.

If labor is the eternal, naturally imposed condition of human life, labor power is the eternal, active, mediating capacity bringing humankind into contact with the material order. While probing the capital/labor exchange in Grundrisse, Marx (1953: 201) first recognized that workers sold their capacity to labor (Arbeitsfahigkeit) to capitalists, not their labor. Marx used several terms to denote this capacity before settling on labor power (Arbeitskraft). Labor power is a complex conception of potential, ability, power, and force which can act on the material order and refashion it. Labor power is the unique human capacity to establish an interaction with the material world through an activity that is concurrently concrete and abstract, objective and subjective, immediate and mediate.

In class societies, labor power is the sole source of value creation. Because labor power is a capacity, the purchaser need only pay enough for the worker – the bearer of this potential – to meet his or her socially determined needs and thereby be able to return to work day after day. The expenditure of labor power over a full working day, however, may produce more value than the replacement value of labor power, giving rise to surplus value. The identification of labor power as the source of surplus in capitalist societies was among Marx s most significant discoveries.

Bibliography:

Lukacs, G. (1978) The Ontology of Social Being: Labour, trans. D. Fernbach. Merlin Press, London.
Marx, K. (1976) [1890] Capital, 4th edn. vol. 1, trans. B. Fowkes. Penguin, London.
Marx, K. (1953) [1857-58] Grundrisse. Dietz, Berlin.