Firstly I’m no Marx scholar or anything, so I’m not a definitive source for this, just my own understanding from lots of different readings over the years.

That idea of course has some merit, but that power is bounded by the worker’s need for survival, which are relatively constant across people (everyone needs so many calories, etc), vs the productive capacity of a worker is hugely variable, from an expert CNC operator to someone hand-knitting sweaters.

I think the concept of ‘socially necessary labor’ might help with this part. Using the CNC operator, their productive capacity is dependent on lots of other labor that may not be considered in that calculation. So this sort of discounts the concept of individual productivity as being the reference point of determining value of that labor. This is very counter-intuitive in some ways, but I think it’s an important aspect to comprehend. Basically capital only really cares about ‘abstract labor’ or ‘labor in aggregate’ for the most part. There’s some edge cases like the CNC operator, but that only exist because of the ideology embedded in that logic.

This is a longish read, but it gets at a lot of the stuff that might be missing from your vibes.

https://ianwrightsite.wordpress.com/2020/09/03/marx-on-capital-as-a-real-god-2/

I’ll try to pull some of the relevant quotes for you later.

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Here’s the part I was thinking about:

The content of value, or abstract labour

So let’s begin with the first mystery: what is the abstraction of exchange-value? What do those money quantities actually denote?

Marx argues that exchange-value refers to a special, common property shared by all commodities — that of being the products of labour. So caviar and clicks are the same because, to manifest them as commodities in the marketplace, requires the sacrifice of someone’s labour.

Marx then says that the common property cannot be specific kinds of labour — because fishing for caviar, or writing advertising software, or clowning, or making bullets — are very different activities.

The act of exchange abstracts from the individual peculiarities of different labouring activities, leaving something common to all of them, which Marx calls “human labour in the abstract”, or abstract labour. Commodities, according to Marx, have economic value “only because human labour in the abstract has been embodied or materialised in it”.

Now, we have to be careful with the term “embodied”. Marx doesn’t literally mean that abstract labour inheres within the material body of the commodity. Abstract labour is not a physical property of a thing. What he means is that some definite fraction of the total labour time of society must be used-up, or expended, to produce the commodity and bring it to market.

So abstract labour is not concrete labour, not a specific type of labouring activity, but something else, something deeper and more general. As Marx states, abstract labour has “the character of the average labour-power of society”. So a good first approximation is to think of abstract labour as denoting the causal powers of the typical or average worker. That isn’t quite right, but it will do for now.

So, according to Marx, the titanic abstraction achieved by commodity exchange refers to a specific content, which is a property of the material world that he calls abstract labour.

How do we measure abstract labour?

Marx then immediately asks the obvious question, “How, then, is the magnitude of this value to be measured?” and he answers, in a seemingly straightforward way, that it is measured “by its duration, and labour time in its turn finds its standard in weeks, days, and hours.” So we’re talking about units of time.

We might suppose, therefore, that we can immediately pull out our stopwatches and start measuring the amount of time people spend working, and then correlate our measurements with the prices we observe in the market. Because if prices really do represent labour-time then we should, in-principle, be able to scientifically verify this claim.

But that would be too hasty. Before we can even consider empirically verifying Marx’s theory of value, we need more clarity on what that theory actually is.

Now I’m not sure how deliberate this is, especially as I read Marx in translation. But it might be noteworthy that Marx does not ask, “How should we measure quantities of abstract labour?”, and neither does he answer by saying that “we can measure it by its duration”.

And that’s because we don’t measure abstract labour. Something else measures it.

This property of Marx’s theory — that money refers to labour time in virtue of our collective, social activity and independently of our thoughts about it — is radically different from the classical political economy of his day, and also modern economic theory.

The abstraction is not ours because our cognition is not performing the abstraction. We are not the abstractor. Instead, the mysterious abstractor is taking the measurements about labour time and connecting the form of value, which is money, to its content, which is abstract labour.

So, as scientists, our first job isn’t to start measuring labour time. Our first job is to understand what the abstractor is, and how it connects its abstraction to its world. We need a theory of this abstracting entity, and its powers, before embarking on empirical verification. Who or what is the abstractor?

So we have a partial answer to the first economic mystery. The abstraction of exchange-value, or more plainly money, represents “abstract labour”. So let’s turn to the second mystery: who is doing the abstracting? Who or what is the mysterious abstractor?

In fact, Marx has already told us who it is. Sometimes mysteries hide in plain sight. The big clue is Marx’s choice of the title for his magnum opus. The abstractor is what Marx calls “capital”.

But the term “capital” can mislead. First of all, it gets us thinking about large sums of money. A capital sum. But capital is much more than that. And, second, modern economic theory has reduced the term “capital” to a vanilla accounting term that mixes-up, in a confused way, capital equipment with large sums of money.

But capital, for Marx, is first and foremost a social practice. Capital denotes a collection of activities that certain people regularly do embedded within a system of property rights, contracts, and coercive power. Capital is a circuit, where an initial capital sum is “invested” in production, and then typically returns with a profit increment. Capital enlarges itself, whenever it can. This circuit is mediated not only by money, but also economic production itself, including the disciplining and exploitation of workers.

Marx’s standard language — of capital, of social relations of production, circuits of accumulation, and so on — doesn’t fully evoke what’s really going on, and I think that’s why he often turned to religious language.

So instead of saying “capital” I’m also going to say “the controller”. Because capital is a control system, not merely in the political sense, but in the more profound and scientifically important sense of being a negative feedback control system. Capital is literally a controller. So if capital is a controller, then how does it work, and what does it control?

This leads into the main topic of the blog post which is this abstracting control loop concept at the heart of how capitalism functions.