Labor Power Day

Labour power (German: Arbeitskraft; French: force de travail) is the capacity to do work, a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, i.e. labour power, and the physical act of working, i.e. labour.

[1] Labour power exists in any kind of society, but on what terms it is traded or combined with means of production to produce goods and services has historically varied greatly.[citation needed] Under capitalism, according to Marx, the productive powers of labour appear as the creative power of capital. Indeed, "labour power at work" becomes a component of capital, it functions as working capital. Work becomes just work, workers become an abstract labour force, and the control over work becomes mainly a management prerogative.

Definition edit

Karl Marx introduces the concept in chapter 6 of the first volume of Capital, as follows:

"By labour-power or capacity for labour is to be understood the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises whenever he produces a use-value of any description."[2]

He adds further on that: "Labour-power, however, becomes a reality only by its exercise; it sets itself in action only by working. But thereby a definite quantity of human muscle, nerve. brain, &c., is wasted, and these require to be restored."[2]

Another explanation of labour-power can be found in the introduction and second chapter of Marx's Wage Labour and Capital (1847).[3] Marx also provided a short exposition of labour power in Value, Price and Profit (1865).[4][5]

Versus labour edit

Marx adapted a distinction, in Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right between labour power (Arbeitskraft) and labour (Arbeit) and gave this distinction a new significance. For Marx, Arbeitskraft, which he sometimes instead refers to as Arbeitsvermögen ("labour-ability" or "labour-capacity") refers to a "force of nature":[6][7] the physical ability of human beings and other living things to perform work, including mental labour and skills such as manual dexterity, in addition to sheer physical exertion. Labour power is, in this sense, also the aspect of labour that becomes a commodity within capitalist society and is alienated from labourers when it is sold to capitalists.[8]

By contrast, "labour" may refer to all or any activity by humans (and other living creatures) that is concerned with producing goods or services (or what Marx calls use-values). In this sense, the usage of labour (per se) in Marxian economics is somewhat similar to the later concept, in neoclassical economics, of "labour services".[9]

The distinction between labour and labour-power, according to Marx, helped to solve a problem that David Ricardo had failed to solve, i.e. explaining why the surplus value resulting from profit normally arises out of the process of production itself—rather than in the investment of capital (e.g. the advance of money-capital in the form of wages) in labour-power (acquired from labourers).[10]

While Marx's concept of labour power has been compared to that of human capital, Marx himself may have considered a concept such as "human capital" to be a reification, the purpose of which was to imply that workers were a kind of capitalist. For instance, in Capital Vol. 2, Marx states:

Apologetic economists... say:... [the worker's] labour-power, then, represents his capital in commodity-form, which yields him a continuous revenue. Labour-power is indeed his property (ever self-renewing, reproductive), not his capital. It is the only commodity which he can and must sell continually in order to live, and which acts as capital (variable) only in the hands of the buyer, the capitalist. The fact that a man is continually compelled to sell his labour-power, i.e., himself, to another man proves, according to those economists, that he is a capitalist, because he constantly has "commodities" (himself) for sale. In that sense a slave is also a capitalist, although he is sold by another once and for all as a commodity; for it is in the nature of this commodity, a labouring slave, that its buyer does not only make it work anew every day, but also provides it with the means of subsistence that enable it to work ever anew. — Karl Marx, Capital Vol. 2, chapter 20, section 10[11]

As commodity Value Wages Consumption Reproduction

The role of the state Quotation by Marx on the value of labour power and classical political economy edit

"Classical Political Economy borrowed from every-day life the category "price of labour" without further criticism, and then simply asked the question, how is this price determined? It soon recognized that the change in the relations of demand and supply explained in regard to the price of labour, as of all other commodities, nothing except its changes i.e., the oscillations of the market-price above or below a certain mean. If demand and supply balance, the oscillation of prices ceases, all other conditions remaining the same. But then demand and supply also cease to explain anything. The price of labour, at the moment when demand and supply are in equilibrium, is its natural price, determined independently of the relation of demand and supply. And how this price is determined is just the question. Or a larger period of oscillations in the market-price is taken, e.g., a year, and they are found to cancel one the other, leaving a mean average quantity, a relatively constant magnitude. This had naturally to be determined otherwise than by its own compensating variations. This price which always finally predominates over the accidental market-prices of labour and regulates them, this "necessary price" (Physiocrats) or "natural price" of labour (Adam Smith) can, as with all other commodities, be nothing else than its value expressed in money. In this way Political Economy expected to penetrate to the value of labour through the medium of the accidental prices of labour. As with other commodities, this value was then further determined by the cost of production. But what is the cost of production-of the labourer, i.e., the cost of producing or reproducing the labourer himself? This question unconsciously substituted itself in Political Economy for the original one; for the search after the cost of production of labour as such turned in a circle and never left the spot. What economists therefore call value of labour, is in fact the value of labour-power, as it exists in the personality of the labourer, which is as different from its function, labour, as a machine is from the work it performs. Occupied with the difference between the market-price of labour and its so-called value, with the relation of this value to the rate of profit, and to the values of the commodities produced by means of labour, &c., they never discovered that the course of the analysis had led not only from the market-prices of labour to its presumed value, but had led to the resolution of this value of labour itself into the value of labour-power. Classical economy never arrived at a consciousness of the results of its own analysis; it accepted uncritically the categories "value of labour," "natural price of labour," &c.,. as final and as adequate expressions for the value-relation under consideration, and was thus led, as will be seen later, into inextricable confusion and contradiction, while it offered to the vulgar economists a secure basis of operations for their shallowness, which on principle worships appearances only." — Marx, Capital Vol. 1, chapter 19[17]