Addressing Dystopian Views of Communism, Rooted in Fundamental Misunderstandings and/or Disingenousness
| Term | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Concrete Labor | Labor retaining its specific kind or character and producing definitive use-values, i.e. tailoring, gold mining, apple farming. |
| Abstract Labor | Labor having lost its specific kind or character, constituted as a general capacity to produce irrespective of what it has produced. |
| Individual Labor | Labor as performed by a given producer with regard to their specific production process and conditions towards a definite product. |
| Social Labor | Labor performed as a constituent part of an overall social process of production with regard to the generalized or average processes and conditions of society towards a total product. |
| Compound or Complex Labor | Labor which comprises itself as a product of other labor, e.g. skilled labor or tradecraft. |
| Simple Labor | Labor that represents the basic faculties of human beings’ capacity to work. |
All labor is performed as concrete labor.
Individual labor is inherently concrete as it is a definite type of labor being performed towards the production of a definite use-value.
Social labor is inherently abstract as having been having been produced as part of the total social product, the products of individual labor now stand in relation to all other products as pieces of the same pie.
Concrete labor is abstracted through commodification (production for exchange), i.e. the production of use-values for the purpose of realizing their exchange-values. In having become the commodity, labor (crystalized, embodied, whatever) appears as “social labor” and therefore is “made abstract.”
Labor in capitalism is indirectly social:
But because this concrete labour, tailoring in our case, ranks as, and is directly identified with, undifferentiated human labour, it also ranks as identical with any other sort of labour, and therefore with that embodied in the linen. Consequently, although, like all other commodity-producing labour, it is the labour of private individuals, yet, at the same time, it ranks as labour directly social in its character. This is the reason why it results in a product directly exchangeable with other commodities. We have then a third peculiarity of the equivalent form, namely, that the labour of private individuals takes the form of its opposite, labour directly social in its form.
It is this “conceptual abstraction” that demands the real abstraction of labor. The real abstraction is both the precondition (to the extent material conditions change the nature of production itself leading to increased uniformity of production processes, universal education, standardization, etc) and outcome. It is not sufficient for labor to maintain its individual character and qualitative distinctions while merely appearing as equivalents in exchange, all inputs must be reduced and constantly re-reduced to equivalents. They must be made actually equivalent. The deviation of whatever long line of production (all the way from education/training, wages [the food, shelter, etc, of the workers], to the materials, to the machines) from the current social standard, therefore, manifests itself as risk. It is risk for the producer which fails to keep up, and risk for the producer who takes a chance on investing in new processes. Critical to this is the maintenance of the division of labor.
None of this says anything about “individual labor time” or “individual value” which are mere distractions regarding statement which incentivized this article.
The original point with respect to the claim that in a communist society: “homogenized abstract labor is still the substance, but value is gone.” This is a completely dystopian and incompatible view of how Marx saw communist society. Communist society aims to resolve the contradiction, not by simply doing away with one side of it, but by revolutionizing the mode of production itself such that individual, heterogenous, concrete labor is made directly social.
How does individual labor become directly social? By the actual and conscious engagement in social production, i.e. by consciously planning, assessing, and regulating of production at the social scale, as opposed to the unconscious private interests and production that engages inadvertently in social production through market relations:
In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.