#social labor

The fact that labor power can produce more than its value is not due to some magical properties, but boils down to the historically attained level of productivity of labor. If productivity were such that every adult would have to spend all day (minus sleep) to gather enough food just to survive (this is equivalent to the situation where the product of labor is equal to the value of labor power), there would be no surplus product. Capitalism, and class society in general, would be impossible. However, humans must have reached a level of productivity allowing for some surplus product pretty early in their (pre)history. Since value is defined as "congealed", "objectified", "abstract", social (human) labor, Marx's theory of value is a theory about how human labor is regulated in a commodity-producing society. It's a social theory, to put it bluntly, about how people act. Marx saw the apportioning of human labor as the central, ever-present task for all societies. Social labor is what makes the social world go around. So he set about constructing a theory that explains how it works in capitalism. It could be expected that the central concept of that theory would be about... human social labor.

It is (abstract) human social labor that creates value, while the operation of a machine or the activity of an animal doesn’t and/ or can’t. Just one caveat, for good measure, human concrete labor is certainly not the substance of value: it is abstract labor. Abstract labor didn't always exist; there have always been things with the property of being human social labor, some kind of concrete labor. That category is transhistorical and discussed e.g., by Aristotle. Abstract labor is quite different, i.e., a historical formation of concrete labor. The proposition arises within a theory of the different forms of social re-production, or social labor. In the specifically capitalist social (production) relations, just as most any work in any period takes the form of a work, a product, so here the "private", "abstract", latently-social labor instantiated in alienated work trapped in capitalist production relations takes the form of (the product’s) value.

Now, the question is: why that in capitalism human social labor takes the form of value? The general answer is, because of the (historically specific) division of labor typical of general commodity production. Capitalism is premised on atomized, private producers (that don't produce according to a preexisting social plan, nor are they directed by a higher authority. They produce whatever they want, throw it at the market, and then wait whether it will be recognized as socially useful and as part of total social labor (and to what quantitative extent). If it is, this is a signal to go on producing. If it isn't, it's a signal to switch branches or go bankrupt. This is extremely simplified but still understandable, I hope. Whereas in a non-capitalist economy, human labor is directly social (it is apportioned prior to the fact of being set in motion); in capitalism, the private labor only becomes recognized as social through the market. So the apportioning of human social labor in non-capitalist societies is done "ex ante", while in capitalism it's "post festum". The market gives signals and social labor is apportioned based on them.

"Value" represents the amount of social labor necessary to (re)produce a commodity. By definition, social labor is something that only humans do. In all societies, human activity must be somehow apportioned to different branches of the division of labor that produce what is necessary for the society to reproduce (and also more than what is only necessary -- surplus product). It can be done consciously, through a common, agreed upon plan or through direct relations of domination, for example. Marx views capitalism as a society where it is done indirectly, through commodity exchange mediated by money. It's still done in terms of apportioning quantities of human activity, though. It's only that these quantities appear as properties of things (values or prices); and the point is that the way labor is organized in capitalism is precisely through impersonal domination.

In pre-capitalist societies, the domination in organizing social labor was personal and direct: the ruler or chief commanded people to do stuff. Labor was directly social (no exchange needed to recognize labor as social), but there was a lot of direct domination and violence. In capitalism, labor is not directly social, but carried out by private producers. There are no rulers to organize production. So the way it's done is through this roundabout operation on the market, where it is decided whether products (and the quantities of labor expended on them) count as social. There is no direct domination, but there is indirect, impersonal domination -- exerted via prices, for example, or by the fact that someone who only owns labor power is forced to sell it or live in abject poverty (at best). The impersonal movement of "things" and "their" properties (values and prices) makes people do things and dominates them. So, impersonal domination is the way social labor is organized in capitalism; and yes, indeed, all of this organizing is done through nothing else than by expenditure of abstract social labor.

My justification for a definition like this -- that human social labor is a central concept in Marx's understanding of all societies, and so to understand a society means to explain how social labor is organized in it. And this is what the definition of the value of a commodity as congealed social labor enables us to do (or so Marx thought).

So, Marx's theory of value is about how social labor is apportioned in generalized commodity production. The point of Marx's value theory is basically to explain how the distribution of social labor time works in capitalism. Marx assumes (correctly, I believe) that money, which he decides to call a form of value, is a tool that facilitates the organization of human labor; money is a form taken by something called value. Value, money, etc., is used to organize economic activity in a particularly asocial kind of society; and, in a competitive market society, there will tend to be equilibrium (abstracting for the moment from "prices of production"?) in exchange ratios between products of labor, and logically the ratios must revolve around quantities of labor, at least at the level of simple commodity production, which is more a conceptual tool than a real historical phase.

1. Labor that creates something useful is not necessarily value. And what is produced does not necessarily have value, e.g., labor in a family, or during feudalism -- or socialism -- does not have value and is "social labor."

2. Abstract labor is concrete "private labor" that has become social in that it is equalized with all other forms of labor as "values" in a commodity economy.

3. Abstract labor thus creates and is the content/ substance of "value."

4. The magnitude of value is the amount of this abstract labor.

5. The "Form of Value" (or more correctly "Value as Form"?) is the social relations of labor that take on a material form in a commodity economy. (This, I believe, is the crux of the fetishism of commodities).

6. The concrete form of this (more abstract) notion of the form of value/ value as form is "exchange value" that undergoes a "metamorphosis" from Form I – Form IV: i.e., from exchange characterized by bartering things/commodities (?) on the basis of their value as abstract labor (Form I) to the expression of value/abstract labor by a single commodity (Form III) and finally to the representation of this single commodity by money (Form IV).