Concrete Useful Labour

A: ‛amal malmūs al-fa’idah. – F: travail concret et utile. – G: konkrete nützliche Arbeit. – R: konkrjetnyi poleznyj trud. – S: trabajo concreto y útil. – C: juti de youyong laodong 具体的有用劳动

In analysing the dual character of labour, Marx presents the following summary: “On the one hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power, in the physiological sense, and it is in this quality of being equal, or abstract, human labour that it forms the value of commodities. On the other hand, all labour is an expenditure of human labour-power in a particular form and with a definite aim, and it is in this quality of being CUL that it produces use-values.” (C I, 137 [MEW 23/61; in the French edition Marx inserts an ‘and’: “travail concret et utile”; MEGA II.7/29]) Here the specific determinations are already completely contained in the context of CUL, yet at the same time this is one of the few instances where Marx places concrete and useful next to each other in this way; in a few other places he inserts a comma between the two attributes (156 [78]) or arranges them in reverse order: “useful, concrete” (150 [72]), which in formal terms indicates the equal status of the two determinations.

In contrast to Marx’s phrasing, the combination ‘concretely useful’ – possibly with a hyphen, which does not occur in Marx – has occupied many generations of Marxists (especially in value theory, industrial sociology, and labour research). Here, “concrete” is taken in the adverbial sense, as a modification of the term “useful”. The combination of the two thus functions as an intensification and grants a special characteristic to the usefulness. It then solidifies into a fixed term, which lends it a mystique that is difficult to dispel, and which acts as a deterrent to following Marx’s “useful labour” along its logical threads, implications, and permutations in fluctuating functional contexts and from diverse perspectives. Common sense is wholly inclined to charge the category with moral value and to set the ‘good’ concrete in opposition to the ‘bad’ abstract. The theoretical, analytical character of the Marxian concept CUL is lost in the process. It is therefore appropriate to first examine the different ways in which Marx uses the term and to investigate the common thread that allows us to perceive the term’s common features across its various meanings.

In their reception, Marx’s concepts become the basis for, among other things, debates on wage workers becoming ‘indifferent’ to their work, an indifference arising from the wage form, and in turn for debates over issues such as ‘qualifications’ and resistance. They also serve as the basis for feminist critique of domestic, family, or consumption work, which is neglected in Capital – and finally for the value-theoretical debates that would flare up again and again, as well as the epistemological controversies concerning Capital and its reading.

1. Marx develops the determinations of “useful labour”, based on a basic ‘anthropological’ characterisation, first in the framework of his analysis of the dual character of labour and the theory of value, then in the analysis of the value-form, in the distinction between the transfer of value and the creation of value, and in the critique of the ideological effects of the wage form.

1.1 Word Usages. – Among the categories that Marx finds ready-made in classical political economy are labour, value, and use-value – as in Adam Smith and, further elaborated, in David Ricardo. From John Locke (1691), Marx (C I, 126, fn. 4 [MEW 23/50, fn. 4]) quotes the sentence: “The natural worth of anything consists in its fitness to supply the necessities, or serve the conveniences of human life.” Marx comments: “In English writers of the seventeenth century we still often find the word ‘worth’ used for use-value and ‘value’ for exchange-value. This is quite in accordance with the spirit of a language that likes to use a Teutonic word for the actual thing, and a Romance word for its reflection.” Drawing on Nicholas Barbon, another 17^th cent. author, Marx categorically severs the commonly-held connection between the materially-useful and the socially-valuable aspects of the commodity: “[a]s use-values, commodities differ above all in quality, while as exchange-values they can only differ in quantity, and therefore do not contain an atom of use-value” (128 [52]). This breaks ground for an epistemic insight that classical economists were unable to grasp and which Marx can claim to have been the “first” to “examine critically” (C I, 132; see CCPE, MECW 29/276 et sq. [MEW 13/22 et sq.]). Marx puts it conceptually in a nutshell as the “twofold nature of the labour contained in commodities”, a point which he emphasises is “crucial for an understanding of political economy” and which thus “requires further elucidation” (C I, 132 [MEW 23/56]). Although labour simultaneously creates use-values and value in one and the same time differential, these two determinations are to be just as clearly distinguished as those of the commodity.

An initial draft phrasing reads: “[t]he labour, whose utility is thus represented by the value in use of its product, or which manifests itself by making its product a use value, we call useful labour” (MECW 35/51 [ibid.]). – In the 1st edn. (1867) it says: “for the sake of simplification, we call it useful labour” (MEGA II.5/22). The expression proves to be insufficient and therefore coalesces into various additional combinations in the following analyses in order to emphasise the respective interrelations: “particular kind of productive labour” (C I, 128 [MEW 23/52]), “useful labour, i.e. productive activity of a definite kind, carried on with a definite aim” (133 [57]), “useful character of the labour” (134 [58]), “concrete labour” (150 [72]), “specific useful and concrete labour” (150 [72]), “specific, concrete, and useful kinds of labour” (156 [78]), “concrete forms and useful properties of actual work” (159 [81]), “useful kinds of labour, or productive activities” (164 [85]), “definite useful kind of labour” (166 [87]), “particular kind of useful labour” (204 [124]), “particular concrete kind of labour” (209 [128]), “labour-power is usefully expended” (302 [209]), “special character as a concrete, useful process” (308 [215]), “useful productive activity directed to a given purpose” (309 [216]), or “labour […] of a specific useful kind” (315 [221]). The reasons for the respective emphases can be deciphered by retracing the analytical work, in which the variety of determinations prevents dogmatic adherence to any one category.

1.2 First of all, the following generally holds true for humans' productive metabolism with nature, by virtue of which they sustain their own life: “useful labour, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity” (133 [57]). Humans create use-values for themselves in order to satisfy their own needs. Man “sets in motion the natural forces which belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the materials of nature in a form adapted to his own needs. Through this movement he acts upon external nature and changes it, and in this way he simultaneously changes his own nature.” (283 [192]) Seen from this perspective, the process of production appears as a labour process, whose “simple elements” are the “purposeful activity, that is work itself, […] the object on which that work is performed, and […] the instruments of that work”, whereby the land is presupposed as being “the universal material of human labour” (284 [193]). The effect, one which is “intended from the outset”, is “an alteration in the object of labour” (287 [195]). The defining purpose is “a piece of natural material adapted to human needs by means of a change in its form” or use-value (ibid.). Planning, a focus on practicality, and the skills required to handle one’s work tools, beginning with subjecting the “play” and the “potentialities” of the “natural forces which belong to his own body […] to his own sovereign power” (283 [192]), are common instances of useful labour in this sense.

A further dimension is added by the social-cooperative nature of work, in which use-value is produced for others based on the division of labour. A further leap in the meaning of ‘usefulness’ occurs when work is done subalternly for others in one way or another, i.e. when external use is to be taken into account. Using the concept of the “power of disposing of the labour-power of others”, as it initially characterises an admittedly “still very crude” “latent slavery” in patriarchal families, in the German Ideology (MECW 5/46 [MEW 3/32]), Marx and Engels have already given us the key to deciphering such relations as being based on class. Where these relations have developed, the burden of labour and the pleasure of enjoyment (the realisation of utility) fall to different classes.

1.3 With commodity production, the relation becomes even more complex and must be understood using different concepts. Now it is neither about useful labour for others in the frame of a community nor a direct power relation, but is instead one motivated by the exchangeability of the product determined according to “social use-values” (C I, 131 [MEW 23/55]). The utility for the producers and the utility for their ‘customers’ come into opposition with each other in a new way when each can “appropriate the commodity of the other, and alienate his own” (178 [99]). In CCPE, Marx expresses this transformation as follows: “his labour is only really labour if it is useful labour for others, and it is useful for him only if it is abstract general labour. It is therefore the task of the iron or of its owner to find that location in the world of commodities where iron attracts gold.” (MECW 29/325 [MEW 13/71]) This “difficulty, the salto mortale of the commodity” (ibid.), is only overcome when the sale has taken place.

In Capital, then – except for in one passage (C I, 209 [MEW 23/128]) – Marx replaces “abstract universal [allgemein] labour” with “equal, or abstract, human labour” (137 [61]). The emerging realisation problem, in that the fruits of labour only ever come to show on the market retroactively whether or not the act of production was “really labour” in the sense of “useful labour for others” (MECW 29/325 [MEW 13/71]), is to be seen here in the form of an aporia: “[a]ll commodities are non-use-values for their owners, and use-values for their non-owners. Consequently, they must all change hands. But this changing of hands constitutes their exchange, and their exchange puts them in relation with each other as values and realizes them as values. Hence commodities must be realized as values before they can be realized as use-values. On the other hand, they must stand the test as use-values before they can be realized as values. For the labour expended on them only counts in so far as it is expended in a form which is useful for others. However, only the act of exchange can prove whether that labour is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others.” (C I, 179 et sq. [MEW 23/100 et sq.]) Both aspects of commodity-producing labour – that which produces use-value and that which creates value – thus have their specific realisation problem.

1.4 The development of commodity production is based on the fact that the “qualitatively different forms of useful labour” (132 [56]) undertaken in the social form of “mutually independent acts of labour, performed in isolation” (132 [57]) differentiate themselves and thus develop “into a complex system, a social division of labour” (133). In a private economy based on division of labour, the productive metabolism with nature must be supplemented by the “social metabolism” (198 [119]) in the form of commodity circulation – first as an “exchange of products” (166 [88]), then as a commodity-money relationship in the complementary yet opposing forms of purchase and sale.

Marx brings the concept of the concrete into play as an additional determination of useful labour in the ‘horizontal’ distinction of those “different concrete forms” of production activities (128 [52]), namely in the negative mode of what must be abstracted from. In order to demonstrate the commonality of the heterogeneous products, which makes them comparable in the first place, he carries out the thought experiment of removing the use-value from the conception of commodities, thus also their “material constituents” and “sensuous characteristics”, indeed “the useful character of the products of labour” altogether, and of keeping the latter only as products of labour as such. In the subsequent step, he extends this experiment to the labour of which they are the products. Only now, in the determination of the substance of value, does the category of the concrete enter into play, and again negatively: abstraction must be made from what Marx now calls “the different [concrete] kinds of labour” (171 [92]). An example of a “concrete” form of useful labour would be “spinning, weaving and making clothes” (ibid.). What remains as the commonality inherent in the diverse commodities is “the same kind of labour, human labour in the abstract” (128 [52])). “[A]bstract” here is simply meant to negate the determinations of the concrete which have just been presented, thus meaning ‘non-concrete’, ‘not having a definite form’, but instead ‘expended human labour-power as such’. (In the 1st edn., it had been phrased as: “human labour as such”, C I, 1022 [MEGA II.5/27]; likewise in Grundrisse, MECW 28/41 [MEW 42/38].)

In the further analysis of the dual character of labour, Marx consistently uses the category of useful labour or the “useful character of labour”, i.e. “the determinate quality of productive activity”, which must be left out of consideration in order to discover, on the other side of this dual character, the “expenditure of human labour-power” (C I, 134 [MEW 23/58]) for the “substance of value”, and time as the determinant of the quantum of value.

Only with the question of labour productivity does the determination of labour as concrete come into play again, and yet again negatively: “As productivity is an attribute of labour in its concrete useful form, it naturally ceases to have any bearing on that labour as soon as we abstract from its concrete useful form.” (137 [61]) In his choice of words, Marx here orchestrates a clash of concrete and abstract in order to demonstrate the “contradictory movement” (ibid. [60]) between material wealth and the magnitude of its value, which subsequently determines the dynamics of the capitalistically operated production process: “For this reason, the same change in productivity which increases the fruitfulness of labour, and therefore the amount of use-values produced by it, also brings about a reduction in the value of this increased total amount, if it cuts down the total amount of labour-time necessary to produce the use-values.” (137 [61])

Excursus on the double meaning of “abstract” and “concrete”. – When Marx uses the term “concrete” to distinguish the “specific” or “particular kinds of productive labour” from one another, he is following everyday language. In the method chapter of Intro 57, on the other hand, he shows that the “imagined concrete” immediately presupposed by everyday consciousness is nothing but “a chaotic conception of the whole” (MECW 28/37 [MEW 42/35]). In the reflected, epistemological sense of “the reproduction of the concrete” “by way of thinking” (38 [ibid.]) the following applies: “The concrete is concrete because it is a synthesis of many determinations, thus a unity of the diverse.” (Ibid.) Thus, if spontaneously “it would seem right to start with the real and concrete, with the actual presupposition”, closer consideration “shows, however, that this is wrong” (37 [34 et sq.]). Population as an imagined concrete “is an abstraction if, for instance, one disregards the classes of which it is composed. These classes in turn remain an empty phrase if one does not know the elements on which they are based, e.g. wage labour, capital, etc. These presuppose exchange, division of labour, prices, etc.” (37 [35]). It is this combination of “determining, abstract, general relationships”, obtained by analysis and true to reality, to which the “scientifically correct” representation owes its thanks. “Inevitable is the moment of discipline, to first abstractively hold on to one side of the multifaceted and to study it for itself, as well as the corrective counter-movement, not to let the isolation of this one side, called for in terms of thinking economy, fall into the metaphysical trap of attributing an inner essence to it.” (W.F.Haug 2006, 40)

What Marx says of the exchange-value category also applies to CUL: as ‘concrete’ as it is presented, it is nevertheless just as much a “one-sided relation of an already existing concrete, living whole” (MECW 28/38 [MEW 42/36]), such as the category of abstract labour. Each of the two determinations represents only one side of commodity-producing labour that is to be characterised as twofold. But these abstractions also combine different determinations in their own respective ways. Thus, for example, the residue of abstraction – “merely congealed quantities [Gallerte] of homogeneous [unterschiedslos] human labour” (C I, 128 [MEW 23/52]) – does not get rid of this character of abstraction and requires the negative relation to its complementary opposite: the real difference (“unterschieds-los” [homogeneous in the sense of not being differentiated]), thus forming a logical mental concretum sui generis, no less complex than the conceptual abstraction CUL, which is preserved as abstractly negated in its counter-concept.

1.5 The question of useful labour which creates use-value in relation to that which creates value becomes relevant in a new way, dialectically contradicting its previous separation, in the determination of the equivalent form. The point of departure is the problem of how, as a precondition of exchange, the value of one commodity can be expressed in relation to another, while the common factor, abstract human labour, is not visible, i.e. not sensuously, corporeally present. In the structurally-simplest form, in which the value of commodity A is expressed in a certain quantum of commodity B, the following applies: “The body of the commodity, which serves as the equivalent, always figures as the embodiment of abstract human labour, and is always the product of some specific useful and concrete labour. This concrete labour therefore becomes the expression of abstract human labour.” (150 [72]) The “value abstraction” or the negation of the “natural form” of a commodity appears here as the “natural form” of the second commodity, which serves as the material of the value expression of the first, as its “body of value” (141 et sqq. [65 et sq.]).

It is this “expression of equivalence”, a prefiguration of the price expressed in a quantum of money, that “brings to view [Vorschein] the specific character of value-creating labour by actually reducing the different kinds of labour embedded in the different kinds of commodity to their common quality of being human labour in general” (142 [65]). Here, Marx again uses the abbreviated form ‘concrete’, as an antithesis to abstract, to define the process. At first glance this seems puzzling that something would become the expression of its opposite. Now, once again, there is a change to what is considered useful. “In the expression of value of the linen, the usefulness of tailoring consists, not in making clothes, and thus also people, but in making a physical object which we at once recognize as value, as a congealed quantity of labour, therefore, which is absolutely indistinguishable from the labour objectified in the value of the linen. In order to act as such a mirror of value, tailoring itself must reflect nothing apart from its own abstract quality of being human labour.” (150 [72]) Marx succinctly points out that “concrete labour becomes the form of manifestation of its opposite, abstract human labour” (150 [73]). This line of argument is directed at the further contradiction that thereby “private labour” is taken at the same time to be “labour in its directly social form” (151 [ibid.]).

In the context of useful labour as a “form of manifestation” or “tangible form of realization of abstract human labour” (150 [ibid.]), Marx always adds the adjective concrete to the determinations of useful labour when it is to be said that a “specific, concrete, and useful kind of labour” is contained in the commodity equivalent, a qualitatively special kind of labour that is “therefore not an exhaustive form of appearance of human labour in general” (157 [78 et sq.]), while at the same time abstract labour is stealthily taking charge of the practices of production and exchange and thus also of the consciousness of the producers.

1.6 In so far as the determining purpose and driving motive are quanta of abstract wealth expressed in money, to the same degree that this viewpoint dominates, the active parties become just as ‘indifferent’ to the characteristics of usefulness of their activities and products; it is ‘all the same’ to them, just as money is formally considered to be ‘all the same’ in terms of value. “Definite quantities of product, quantities which are determined by experience, now represent nothing but definite quantities of labour, definite masses of crystallized labour-time. They are now simply the material shape taken by a given number of hours or days of social labour. The fact that the labour is precisely the labour of spinning, that its material is cotton, its product yarn, is as irrelevant here as it is that the object of labour is itself already a product, hence already raw material.” (297 [204]) Again and again Marx uses the term ‘indifferent’ to inculcate the arbitrariness of the determinate product and thus of the determinate CUL from the standpoint of the interest of valorisation (294, 358 [202, 263]). “Use-values must therefore never be treated as the immediate aim of the capitalist.” (254 [168])

In The Results of the Immediate Production Process, Marx extends this thesis to the effect of consciousness of the wage-form: “Just as capital […] is indifferent to the particular material shape [stoffliche Gestalt] in which it appears in the labour process, […] so the worker is indifferent to the particular content of his labour […] he has only sold it in order to appropriate to himself money, and, with that money, the means of subsistence.” (MECW 34/420 [MEGA II.4.1/88])

In the Grundrisse, where this thesis is broadly elaborated, Marx blends together the two meanings of “abstract” – which, in a strict sense, would be incompatible – one of which means the social abstraction of value, the other the material [stoffliche] natural form: the indifference emerges all the more clearly the more that labour loses its “craft-like character” and “the more it becomes purely abstract, purely mechanical activity, hence irrelevant, indifferent to its particular form; the more it becomes merely formal activity or, what is the same, merely physical [stoffliche] activity, activity pure and simple, indifferent to its form” (MECW 28/223 [MEW 42/218 et sq.]). If one overlooks the fact that the context is about the formation of the capital-labour relation of production as a “particular material mode of production” that only becomes real at “a particular stage of development of the industrial productive forces” (ibid. [219]), this formulation could lead one to mistakenly interpret the CUL of a machine operator or the monotonously repetitive activity on an assembly line, which are precisely forms that CUL assumes at the corresponding level of forces of production, as the transformation of concrete labour into abstract labour.

Such determinations no longer exist in the more theoretically-developed Capital. However, in the later discussion of assembly line work, and even of working with high-tech automation, they have led to inferring or predicting the indifference of workers to their own work practice, from their yoke to the value relation (see below).

1.7 The dialectical play with the opposition of concrete and abstract serves as an impressive demonstration of a reversal that helps to decipher the “mystical character” (C I, 164 [MEW 23/85]) of the commodity and of money. Thus, in the “general form of value”, in which the precursor of the future money commodity provides the common expression of value to all other kinds of commodities, “the labour objectified in the values of commodities is not just presented negatively, as labour in which abstraction is made from all the concrete forms and useful properties of actual work. Its own positive nature is explicitly brought out, namely the fact that it is the reduction of all kinds of actual labour to their common character of being human labour in general, of being the expenditure of human labour-power.” (159 et sq. [81])

1.8 In the section on commodity fetishism, which integrates the findings of the analysis of commodity and value-form gained up to this point into an initial overview, Marx, as if he had foreseen the manifold discussions and misunderstandings surrounding this question, once again inculcates that “it is a physiological fact that they [i.e., the useful or productive activities] are functions of the human organism, and that each such function, whatever may be its nature or its form, is essentially the expenditure of human brain, nerves, muscles and sense organs. […] In all situations, the labour-time it costs to produce the means of subsistence must necessarily concern mankind […]. And finally, as soon as men start to work for each other in any way, their labour also assumes a social form.” (164 [85 et sq.]) In commodity production, which is both organised along the principles of private division of labour and systemically even if covertly regulated by the value of those commodities, it takes on the form of wage labour with abstract labour dominating CUL.

In the wider analysis of the commodity form and commodity fetishism, the adjective “concrete” becomes superfluous. The analytical gaze is directed upon the fate of every “kind of useful private labour”, which as interchangeable must count as equal to one another, i.e. abstracted from their “real inequality” (166 [87]). Marx calls this the “twofold social character” of private labour (ibid.), in which useful items are produced for others and this appears in the “private producer’s brain” in “the form of the common character, as values, possessed by these materially different things” (ibid. [88]). The terms chosen for this analysis are now “useful”, or “socially useful” on the one hand, while on the other “human labour in the abstract” (166 [87 et sq.]) continues to be used.

1.9 In the course of the analysis of money and the simple circulation of commodities, too, it is the “particular kind of useful labour” (204 [124]) – in this case gold production – whose significance is established; there would be no reason to designate it as concrete, for it is no longer a question of the dialectical intertwining of abstract and concrete, and it is this that gives the term its functional meaning. “When they thus assume the shape of values [gold], commodities strip off every trace of their natural and original use-value, and of the particular kind of useful labour to which they owe their creation, in order to pupate into the homogeneous social materialization of undifferentiated human labour.” (204 [123 et sq.])

Marx takes this thought further, going into the internal contradiction of the commodity. When it comes to the opposing natures of use-value and value, he speaks once again of “a particular concrete kind of labour which simultaneously counts as merely abstract universal labour” (209 [128]), as the term concrete always seems to suggest itself to him as being the opposite of abstract human labour.

1.10 Transfer of value. – While it is sufficient for the consideration of the creation of value and surplus value to speak of the expenditure of labour “in a useful manner”, because it is “merely the necessary condition” of valorisation, i.e., “in order to create value labour must be expended in a useful manner” (300 [208]), Marx sometimes still adds the term concrete when he chooses examples of specific work activities, such as the “labour of spinning”, in the analysis of the transfer of value (308 [215]). Precisely the latter is shown to be crucial in preserving the value of the means of production consumed in it. “Concrete” now refers to the qualitatively-determined activity in which the transfer of the results of abstract labour contained in the objects and means of labour, in so far as they represent capital value, simultaneously takes place at every moment in which the spinner creates new value by expending their labour-power. In the following observations, the expression concrete would to a certain extent also be concretistic, because the point must furthermore be made that labour is employed as “useful productive activity directed to a given purpose” (309 [216]), and in each case must be of an appropriate “specific useful kind” (315 [221]) in order to transfer value.

The latter, as skilled “labour-power in its fluid state”, therefore acquires a crucial function for the qualityless side of labour “in its coagulated state, in objective form” (142 [65]) on the side of constant capital, i.e. the work objects and means of labour used as the means of production. Intended to serve as productive use-values, their purpose must be realised – namely by useful labour. This must change them “from mere possible into real and effective use-values” or realise “their character of use-values” (289 et sq. [198]), whereby it adds “by virtue of its general character as expenditure of human labour-power in the abstract […] new value” and “by virtue of its special character as a concrete, useful process” preserves the value of the means of production (308 [215]). Marx calls this a “twofold effect” resulting from the “twofold character of labour” (309 [216]). In every crisis in which the means of production are at a standstill, this relationship becomes vividly apparent as a loss of value for the capitalist, and as unemployment for the worker.

1.11 If CUL is at first synonymous with productive labour, the meaning of this determination changes with the relations of production. Under the conditions of capital, this concept becomes narrower. It is not enough for the wage labourer to produce use-values, nor is it enough for them to transfer the value of the expended means of production to the product and in the same moment create new value; they must produce surplus-value. The term ‘productive’ thus no longer merely entails “a relation between the activity of work and its useful effect”, but encompasses “a specifically social relation of production, a relation with a historical origin which stamps the worker as capital’s direct means of valorization. To be a productive worker is therefore not a piece of luck, but a misfortune.” (644 [532]) Class antagonism, in an appropriately antagonistic fashion, also tears apart the meaning of the term “productive”.

1.12 In analysing the “mystery of wages” (681), Marx shows how “a specific form of useful labour, such as tailoring, cobbling, spinning, etc.” so occupies the perception of wage labourers that the fact that “this same labour is, on the other hand, the universal value-creating element […] falls outside the frame of reference of the everyday consciousness” (681 [563]). The fact that Marx omits the adjective ‘concrete’ here, even though it is again about the opposition of CUL to value-creating, abstract labour, shows the interchangeability of the adjective.

When Marx eventually speaks about the repercussions the development of forces of production will have for labour activities, he does not use expressions such as ‘concrete useful’ and ‘abstract human’. He shows how first the dismantling of skilled manufacturing work activities and then the “revolution in the instruments of labour” (517 [416]) through the machinery of large-scale industry have fundamentally changed labour activities. “The lifelong speciality of handling the same tool now becomes the lifelong speciality of serving the same machine.” (547 [445]) The “speciality” of useful work is shown here to be harmful to workers in that it “exhausts the nervous system to the uttermost”, suppresses “the many-sided play of the muscles” and confiscates “every atom of freedom, both in bodily and in intellectual activity” (548 [ibid.]).

2. “History”, wrote Antonio Labriola in 1897, “might be presented as a sombre drama, entitled The Tragedy of Labour” (SocPh, 109). In the history of the labour movement there have been multiple struggles over the quality of work and its intensity, over the length of working time, over health and safety, over women's and children's work, and finally against what Marx calls the “dominion which is direct and unconcealed” of capital (C I, 635 [MEW 23/526]).

2.1 Whereas Marx elaborated in all their “contradictions and antagonisms […] the elements for forming a new society and the forces tending towards the overthrow of the old one” (ibid.), the critical industrial sociologists of the 20^th cent. took up his description of the impoverishment of the workers, and from the indifference of capital and value creation toward CUL inferred the indifference of the workers toward their own CUL – for which there are also indications in Marx in Results and Grundrisse (see above). Controversies surrounding the subsumption of labour under capital drew Marx’s descriptions of factory work together with the Hegelianising passages from the Grundrisse, resulting in the perception that the central concept in Marx was “abstract labour” and the whole analysis concerned with the process of transforming concrete labour into abstract labour. For example, Rudi Schmiede (1983) states that Marx had not yet been able to fully conceptualise “the real implementation of abstract labour” (73), rather he could only lay the initial groundwork by describing “factory work as simple, monotonous, tedious, stupid, and the workers' relationship toward it as completely alien and indifferent” (57). “Indifference toward concrete labour is accompanied by loyalty to the instance of its abstractification and destruction.” (73) Analysing the “formal transformation of concrete into abstract labour” (57) therefore appears to Schmiede as being an unfulfilled project of Marx’s analysis and a task for industrial sociology to study the “real abstractification of concrete labour” (71) in the automated production process.

An assumption that largely defines the industrial sociological analyses of the 1970s is that – according to Marx’s category of real subsumption – CUL is becoming increasingly abstract. Jürgen Mendner, for example, judged that “highly-skilled labour sectors, complex process knowledge, and extensive decision-making autonomy […] that partially existed with the beginnings of automation tend to be eliminated in the process of real subsumption” (1975, 222). He considers “CUL” to be largely determined by technology “in content and form” (15) and thus comes to the conclusion that it is “not the ‘highly-skilled workers who possess both thorough technical knowledge and rapid adaptability to the increasingly specialised technologies of the enterprise’, as described by [Serge] Mallet [1963/1975], which represent the future image of the worker in automation. Rather, with the real subsumption of automated work on the increase, the type of ‘qualified semi-skilled work’ described by [Horst] Kern [and Michael] Schumann [1970] will prevail. Such work by no means requires a high level of manual, technical, or even scientific training” (222).

The debate over the complementary terms ‘concrete useful’ and ‘abstract human’ has shifted into the question of whether the requirements for CUL demonstrated their own scope and potential through technological changes, or whether technology itself is always “determined down to the last detail by the principles of capital valorisation that apply in the system of private sector production technology” (Mickler et al. 1976, 2). Implicitly, the issue of CUL changing according to the interests of capital re-emerged in the questions of, on the one hand, the skills required at high-tech plants; and on the other, capital control and domination in the production process. Initially, the prevailing view was that there had been a loss of skills and concrete functions (see among others the influential polarisation thesis in Kern/Schumann 1970, according to which advanced technology would produce a few winners and an army of de-skilled workers). – From a perspective of skilled manual labour and craftsmanship, Harry Braverman (1974) could only state losses. Richard Edwards saw “work patterns and pace” as entirely predetermined by the computer programme, so that there could be no room for accommodating and improving workers’ skills or offering any leeway (1979, 121).

Based on a comprehensive overview of the Theories on the Automation of Work (1978a), a key question of Projekt Automation und Qualifikation (PAQ)’s empirical investigations was the transformation in work activities in the “electronic-automatic mode of production” (Haug 1985, 94 et sq.), whose triumphant march would eventually culminate in “transnational high-tech capitalism” (2003, 41). The development of work is examined in terms of the possibilities for development for the workers as a contradictory process. The PAQ is particularly interested in the contradiction of increasing competence in high-tech facilities and the restriction of thinking in terms of use-value and of acting by the purposes of valorisation. “The oft-invoked indifference of wage labour […] becomes a problem the more the worker is needed not merely as a force, but as the creator of things, i.e. the more he himself can and must qualitatively influence the product, its particular characteristics and the course of the production process, the more he is required as a human being.” (PAQ 1981, 415) The development of labour activities is historically investigated as a question of personality development (1978b) with the aim of gaining a yardstick for a correlation between CUL and the expenditure of labour power as such, which is to form a compass in workers' movement struggles – for example, for the ‘humanisation of labour’. The path goes through the analysis of the history of labour and its alienation in interrelation with the development of the forces of production up to high-tech capitalism in the perspective of the re-appropriation of CUL by the collective of workers.

In light of the rapid development of forces of production, which goes hand in hand with “high-tech unemployment” (Haug 2006, 172 et sqq., esp. 229, fn. 148), the PAQ studies seem to represent the unfulfilled promise of possible humanity. In terms such as “employability” (Hartz 2001, 10), the capacity to perform CUL and abstract human labour on demand are merged into a single task whereby individuals must maintain readiness for service at all times. The concept of being qualified for a position really means being flexible, and lies in being individually responsible for orienting one's life in such a way that one can be deployed at any time, in any place, and for any duration like a machine. The “job” is the form in which work is in a constant state of flux, in which individuals have to constantly reinvent themselves and be ‘entrepreneurs of themselves’. This side of CUL as interlocked with abstract human labour remains valid in this perspective, at least in the way that anyone who succeeds in finding paying demand for a form of CUL that was still unknown to them yesterday can consider themselves lucky.

2.2 In many discussions, the term CUL has been and continues to be detached from its precise analytical meaning and is understood as an evaluative moral category. This seems obvious when ‘useful’ is viewed from the standpoint of a mode of socialisation envisioned as organised along principles of solidarity and ecological sustainability. Should the production of ‘harmful’ things – such as weapons or environmentally-damaging products – be called ‘useful’ at all? – In the Refugee Conversations, Brecht has a character tell of a person who was both anti-war and who also manufactured poison gas for a living. “He was a pacifist in his personal life, and gave speeches to the pacifist youth movement in which he railed against the madness of war”. He believed that he had nothing to do with the use of his product. Brecht exposes as ill-conceived the knee-jerk attitude of not wanting to allow “private” pacifism to the producer of military goods. “We knew we were working for the war effort just by working at all. Because if bicycles – innocent objects in and of themselves – can’t cross borders because the markets are saturated, then one fine day tanks will start crossing the borders instead […]. Barbarism begets barbarism, in that the economy begets war.” (RefCon, 40 et sq.)

2.3 Marxian labour value analysis has been rejected by some feminist theorists on the grounds that it is based on the repression of CUL that is being performed by women without pay, i.e. outside of the wage form, in the household. Without really referring to Marxian analysis of productive labour as determined by capital’s recognition of labour as creating surplus value and thus as a “misfortune” for the workers, there is some dispute over whether domestic labour should be recognised as productive (summarised by Pohl 1984). Claudia von Werlhof (1978/1988), for example, considers the value-form analysis to be a mistake precisely because it demonstrates the dual character of labour, as this approach only includes wage labour in its analysis of society, but not every form of CUL and especially not the unpaid labour of women. In this way, the oppression of women is supposedly reproduced as a “blind spot” in the overall analysis. Christel Neusüss (1985) extends the concept of CUL to pregnancy and childbirth and condemns the idea of the dual character of labour, because this would mean that women give birth to their children as a commodity, i.e. as labour power. Although both once again underline the usefulness of labour and relate women's oppression to the yoke of the profit incentive – i.e. the grip on the abstract human side as a general principle of societal control – their critique in fact aims at integrating female reproductive activities into wage labour. The ‘everyday metaphysical’ focus on the concrete and useful, as if this were a fixed and positive variable, fails to harness the strength of Marx’s theory (where it examines the expenditure of labour power) for the issue of women’s rights in such a way that the perspective of liberation is oriented towards a different expenditure of power and a different use of time.

2.4 In relation to wage labour, three types of usefulness of CUL can be emphasised in Marx: the use-value side, the utility for the appropriation of foreign use-value, and the usefulness for the valorisation of capital. In the analysis of the dual character of labour, the determinations ‘concrete’ for specifically differentiated labour and ‘abstract’ for human labour as such (regarded as being equal) appear. Thus, although the formulation “CUL” is neither continuously nor particularly frequently used by Marx, nor is it exhaustive in its determinative value, in the Marxist tradition the category CUL has become established and acquired a solidity that impedes the mobility of thought required to navigate different points of view and changing circumstances. It is as if the category CUL could be used to designate a fixed essence whose content could be defined once and for all. An essence which seems to be, for the time being, captive to abstract human labour to which, for its part, a fixed essence could be attributed as well, instead of a function defined by the relations of production and exchange. Marx focuses on the usefulness of labour to the point where the standpoint of bourgeois self-interest (Bentham) necessitates subjecting also the question of usefulness to different standpoints and historical developments, i.e. to refrain from turning usefulness into a category of essence either.

2.5 The fact that it is only under capitalism that abstract human labour acquires the way of functioning as a blind-systemic regulation is understood by some to mean that the substrate for this function operating through the market would be non-existent under other social conditions. This can be observed in the ‘expert answers’ to a question from student readers of Capital: “Are abstract labour and concrete labour two separate kinds of work, are they two sides of the same coin, or can abstract labour be derived from concrete labour?” (Kapital Forum 2008) Michael Heinrich answers: “Concrete labour is the work that can be observed.” He thus remains trapped in the empiristic semblance of the merely imagined concrete. CUL is a conceptual abstraction that covers one of the two aspects of commodity-producing labour characterised as twofold. But it is impossible to observe a concept (an abstraction). In the sensorial perception of labour, the two determinations are undistinguished. – Heinrich continues: “concrete human labour is a condition of existence of the human being […], abstract labour is the result of a reduction process taking place in exchange”. Here the function (the blind-systemic effect that the expenditure of labour power is measured in value) disappears behind a being that is conceived as dependent on exchange. And while the validity of value [Wertgeltung] is thought of as an existing being, the actual expenditure of human labour power “in the physiological sense”, as Marx says (C I, 137 [MEW 23/61]), vanishes – “but”, Heinrich objects, “only in two places, and […] [Marx] predominantly argues without such naturalistic references”. – “Some Marxists”, Heinrich goes on to explain, “maintain that abstract labour is also something independent of society.” He can reject as nonsensical the assumption that there is such a thing as concrete or abstract labour in itself. But he overlooks the fact that the crisis-ridden process of capital functions according to natural laws, and that what is historically specific to it is built on natural circumstances – by modifying and functionally harnessing those circumstances.

In their joint answer, Sabine Nuss and Ingo Stützle make abstract labour dependent on actual demand: “in the case of the table, which was produced as a commodity but was not sold, we only have concrete labour, not abstract labour” (ibid.). They fail to realise that not only value-creating labour is confronted with the problem of realising its value, but that also CUL equally has to prove, in the act of exchange, “whether that labour is useful for others, and its product consequently capable of satisfying the needs of others” (C I, 180 [MEW 23/101]). If the table becomes a non-seller, the carpentry work to which it owes its existence also loses its usefulness, without the work being undone as a result. To allow for value, and with it value-creating equal labour, to arise only a posteriori from the act of exchange, confuses the act of ‘recognition’ on the market with what is ‘to be recognised’, and erases value theory by way of the “salto mortale” of realisation. In a positivist manner, the not-yet is then summarily regarded as simply not, and the yet-to-be-realised as a non-being. At the same time, the problem of devaluation disappears, a problem which normally causes so many headaches for the agents of capitalist production when the value that has not yet been transformed into money is partially or completely destroyed.

3. The struggle over the usefulness on the one hand, and the valorisation of expended labour power on the other, experiences an enormous intensification in capitalist society, which through the development of the forces of production leads to the edge of the existence of capitalism. Engels inscribes the fate of useful labour, which, from the standpoint of a society based on solidarity, he calls productive labour, into the perspective of liberation: that “productive labour, instead of being a means of subjugating men, will become a means of their emancipation, by offering each individual the opportunity to develop all his faculties, physical and mental, in all directions and exercise them to the full — in which, therefore, productive labour will become a pleasure instead of being a burden” (Anti-Dühring, MECW 25/280 [MEW 20/274]).

Like Engels, the Russian revolutionaries equated useful labour with productive labour and, in the Constitution of Soviet Russia adopted on 10 July 1918, limited the right to vote and to be elected to “all who have acquired the means of livelihood through labour that is productive and useful to society, and also persons engaged in housekeeping which enables the former to do productive work, […], and peasants […] who employ no help [of wage labourers] for the purpose of making profits” – a restriction of the franchise which Lenin, however, regarded as being “not an indispensable characteristic of the logical concept of the ‘dictatorship’ [of the proletariat]” (CW 28/25; cit. in Luxemburg 1918/1922, fn. 7). The clause did take on some practical significance – for example, in the struggle against the ‘kulaks’ who were utilising wage labour (see Miedlig 2004, 21, 53). In the 1936 Constitution, political exclusion clauses were dispensed with.

In terms of perspective, Marx conceives of the dissolution of the interest-driven interlock of CUL with abstract human labour that forms the basis of valorisation. The emancipation of human beings lies in the developing expenditure of power for a communally self-determined purpose, admittedly in accordance with the “economy of time”, of which he inculcates that “[u]ltimately, all economy is a matter of economy of time” (Grundrisse, MECW 28/109 [MEW 42/105]). The perspective of this development aims to shift the separative interconnection between ‘concrete useful’ and ‘abstract human’ into the form of free activity, in which both the dimension of the useful has undergone a historical development and the equal-human dimension of participation in the necessary total work is to be fulfilled in a self-determined way according to a common time schedule in lieu of the generalisation of value. In order for a possible non-antagonistic economy to not remain subject to a “competition in idleness” (MECW 6/143 [MEW 4/103]), a new economy of time in the “realm of necessity” will have to measure and distribute the common affairs by its own method according to the time spent, while striving to push back this realm of necessity to such an extent that it occupies only a small fraction of human time. In Marx’s words: beyond the realm of necessity “begins that development of human energy which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom, which, however, can blossom forth only with this realm of necessity as its basis. The shortening of the working day is its basic prerequisite.” (MECW 37/807 [MEW 25/828]) According to Marx’s insight, the usefulness of labour always remains a servant, chained to necessity. It must be useful for the possibility of freedom.

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Frigga Haug, Wolfgang Fritz Haug

Translated by Kolja Swingle

→ abstract labour, alienation, automation, average, capital (constant and variable), control, crisis, dialectics, disposable time, division of labour, domestic-labour debate, dual character of labour, exchange value, family work/domestic labour/housework, feminism, form of value, form, formal/real subsumption, gender relations, high-tech industry, historical/logical, humanisation of work, indifference, interest, job, labour process debate, laziness, machinery, market, need, production, productive force, productive forces/relations of production, productive/unproductive labour, qualification, standpoint/perspective, use value, commodity, value

→ abstrakte Arbeit, Äquivalentform, Arbeit, Arbeitsprozessdebatte, Arbeitsteilung, Automation, Bedürfnis, Dialektik, disponible Zeit, Doppelcharakter der Arbeit, Durchschnitt, Entfremdung, Faulheit, Feminismus, Form, formelle/reelle Subsumtion, Frauenarbeitspolitik, Gebrauchswert, Geschlechterverhältnisse, Gleichgültigkeit, Hausarbeit, Hausarbeitsdebatte, Historisches/Logisches, Humanisierung der Arbeit, Industrie, Interesse, Job, Kapital (konstantes und variables), Kontrolle, Krise, Markt, Maschine, Produktion, Produktionsverhältnisse, produktive Arbeit, Produktivkräfte, Qualifikationsdebatte, Standpunkt, Tauschwert, Ware, Wert, Wertformanalyse