Abstract and concrete labour

Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect. As discussed in this article, according to Marx abstract labour is a concept that was known and used already in ancient society, but it evolved across time, and is fully developed only in the market relations of industrial capitalism.

Overview

As economically valuable worktime, human labour adds value to products or assets. In this sense, labour is an activity which creates/maintains economic value pure and simple. This could be realized as a sum of money once labour's product is sold or acquired by a buyer. If an employer hires a worker for a contractually specified time to produce something but the worker does not actually do any work, it’s not only a waste of time, but also an extra cost to the employer. The value-creating ability of labour is most clearly visible, when all labour is stopped, for example during a strike or a disaster. If all labour is withdrawn, the value of the capital assets worked with will normally deteriorate. In the end, if all labour is permanently withdrawn, nothing remains but a ghost town.
As a useful activity of a particular kind, human labour can have a useful effect by producing/supplying particular tangible products which are used by others, or by the producers themselves. In this sense, labour is an activity which creates use-values, i.e. "tangible products, results or effects", which can be used or consumed. The use-value of products is usually taken for granted. Its importance becomes very clear only when goods and services are created, which are of poor quality, not supplied on time and mainly useless to the consumer. Labour must be applied to produce usable and useful products, regardless of how much they are sold for, otherwise they cannot be used and there is no use-value or utility at all. If labour produces useless products or results, it creates no value and it is simply a waste of labour-time. Most likely, useless products cannot be sold other than perhaps to a recycling business.

So, Marx argues that human work is both an activity which, by its useful effect, helps to create particular kinds of products, and in an economic sense, a value-forming activity that, if it is productively applied, can help create more value than there was before. If an employer hires labour, the employer thinks both about how useful the labour service will be for his business operations, and about the value that the labour can create for his business. That is, the right kind of work not only needs to get done, but it also needs to get done in a way that it helps the employer to make money.
If the labour makes no net addition to new value produced, then the employer makes no money from it. The labour will be only an expense to him. If the labour is only a net expense, then it is commercially speaking unproductive labour. Yet, it may be very necessary to employ this unproductive labour. If that labour was not done, then considerable capital value might be lost from the employer's financial investments. Indeed, the business might fail without it. That is, labour may be very necessary to maintain capital value, although it does not actually add value to capital, and does not directly add to net profit. So, the employer also buys the "unproductive labour", because it reduces his costs. His labour costs will be lower than the loss of value that would occur, if he did not employ unproductive labour to maintain capital value, and to prevent loss of capital value. For example, cleaning work might seem a very menial and low-value activity. But if business equipment fails, customers stay away, and the staff get sick or injured, it costs the business a lot of extra money.

Origin

In the introduction to his Grundrisse manuscript, Marx argued that the category of abstract labour "expresses an ancient relation existing in all social formations"; but, he continued, only in modern bourgeois society is abstract labour fully realized in practice. Because only there does a system of price-equations exist within a universal market, which can practically reduce the value of all forms and quantities of labour uniformly to sums of money, so that any kind of labour becomes an interchangeable, tradeable good or "input" with a known price tag – and is also practically treated as such. In the Grundrisse, Marx also distinguished between "particular labour" and "general labour", contrasting communal production with production for exchange.
Marx published about the categories of abstract and concrete labour for the first time in A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and they are discussed in more detail in chapter 1 of Capital, Volume I, where Marx writes:

Abstract labour and exchange

Marx himself considered that all economising reduced to the economical use of human labour-time; "to economise" ultimately meant saving on human energy and effort.
However, according to Marx, the achievement of abstract thinking about human labour, and the ability to quantify it, is closely related to the historical development of economic exchange in general, and more specifically commodity trade.
The expansion of trade requires the ability to measure and compare all kinds of things - not just length, volume and weight, but also time itself. Originally, the units of measurement used were taken from everyday life—the length of a finger or limb, the volume of an ordinary container, the weight one can carry, the duration of a day or a season, the number of cattle. Socially standardized measurement units began to be used probably from circa 3000 BC onwards in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and then state authorities began to supervise the use of measures, with rules to prevent cheating and swindling. In a biblical story where God delivers moral guidelines to Moses which people must follow, dishonest measures and mismeasurement are explicitly prohibited: “You shall do no wrong in judgment, in measures of length or weight or quantity. You shall have just balances, just weights…". Once standard measuring units existed, mathematics could begin to develop.
In fact, Marx argues the abstraction of labour in thought is the reflex of a real process, in which commercial trade in products not only alters the way labour is viewed, but also how it is practically treated. In other words, when labour becomes a commercial object traded in the marketplace, then the form and content of work in the workplace is transformed as well, to conform to commercial requirements. This transformation is practically possible, because labour already contains the potential to adapt to the requirements of capitalist business. This potential has already been shaped up by previous schooling and training.But Marx also comments that "The productiveness of labour that serves as foundation and starting-point of , is a gift, not of nature, but of a history embracing thousands of centuries." In other words, human work abilities are the result of a very lengthy evolutionary social process, in which humans acquire the capacities and dispositions to do all kinds of tasks to survive and prosper.
If different products are exchanged in market trade according to specific trading ratios, Marx argues, the exchange process at the same time relates, values and commensurates the quantities of human labour expended to produce those products, regardless of whether the traders are consciously aware of that or not.
Therefore, Marx implies, the exchange process itself involves the making of a real abstraction, namely abstraction from the particular characteristics of concrete labour that produced the commodities whose value is equated in trade.
At first, the relationship between quantities of traded commodities symbolically represents relative costs in labour time. This relationship is ordinarily quite transparent because goods are traded by the people who produced them. Next, money-prices begin to represent symbolically the commodities being traded. In this way, a system of symbolic representation emerges which can facilitate the exchange of the most diverse products with great efficiency. In the end, products as commodities become simply objects of value, and since their value can rise and fall, they can be bought and sold purely for capital gain. Closely related to this, is the growth of a cash economy, and Marx claims that:
In a more complex division of labour, it becomes difficult or even impossible to equate the value of all different labour-efforts directly. But money enables us to express and compare the value of all different labour-efforts—more or less accurately—in money-units. Marx then argues that labour viewed concretely in its specifics creates useful things, but labour-in-the-abstract is value-forming labour, which conserves, transfers and/or creates economic value. In 1844, Marx said that:
In the feudal society of medieval Europe, Marx comments,

Abstract labour and capitalism

If the production process itself becomes organised as a specifically capitalist production process, then the abstraction process is deepened, because production labour itself becomes directly treated and organised in terms of its commercial exchange value, and in terms of its capacity to create new value for the buyer of that labour.
Quite simply, in this case, a quantity of labour-time is equal to a quantity of money, and it can be calculated that X hours of labour—regardless of who in particular performs them—create, or are worth, Y amounts of new product value. In this way, labour is practically rendered abstract.
The abstraction is completed when a labour market is established which very exactly quantifies the money-price applying to all kinds of different occupational functions, permitting equations such as:
X amount of qualified labour = Y amounts of unskilled labour = Z number of workers = P amount of money = Q amount of goods.
This is what Marx calls a value relationship. It can also be calculated that it costs a certain amount of time and money to train a worker to perform a certain task, and how much value that adds to the workers' labour, giving rise to the notion of human capital.
As a corollary, in these conditions workers will increasingly treat the paid work they do as something distinct or separate from their personality, a means to an end rather than an end in itself. Work becomes "just work", it no longer necessarily says anything at all about the identity, creativity or personality of the worker. With the development of an average skill level in the workforce, the same job can also be done by many different workers, and most workers can do many different jobs; nobody is necessarily tied to one type of work all his life anymore. Thus we can talk of "a job" as an abstract function that could be filled by anybody with the required skills. Managers can calculate that with a certain budget, a certain number of paid working hours are required or available to do the work, and then divide up the hours into different job functions to be filled by suitably qualified personnel.
Marx's theory of alienation considers the human and social implications of the abstraction and commercialization of labour. His concept of reification reflects about the inversions of object and subject, and of means and ends, which are involved in commodity trade.
Marx regarded the distinction between abstract and concrete labour as being among the most important innovations he contributed to the theory of economic value, and subsequently Marxian scholars have debated a great deal about its theoretical significance.