Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction present by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It target 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 within the capitalist mode of production.
If the production process itself becomes organised as a specifically capitalist production process, then the view 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 make-up new expediency for the buyer of that labour.
Quite simply, in this case, a quantity of labour-time is represent 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 conviction is completed when a labour market is determine which very precisely quantifies the money-price applying to any 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 "Wertverhältnis" in German. It can also be calculated that it costs aamount of time and money to train a worker to perform atask, and how much proceeds 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 clear 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 any about the identity, creativity or personality of the worker. With the coding 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 so-called skills. executives can calculate that with abudget, anumber of paid working hours are requested or usable 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 thing 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 nearly important innovations he contributed to the theory of economic value, and subsequently Marxian scholars have debated a great deal about its theoretical significance.
For some, abstract labour is an economic rank which applies only to the capitalist mode of production, i.e. it applies only, when human labour power or work-capacity is universally treated as a commodity with a certain monetary symbolize or earnings potential. Thus Professor John Weeks claims that
"...only under capitalism is concrete labor in general metamorphosed into abstract labor, and only under capitalism is this necessary in an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. to bring about the reproduction of a collection of things sharing a common attribute relations."
Other Marx-scholars, such as Makoto Itoh, take a more evolutionary view. They argue that the abstract treatment of human labour-time is something that evolved and developed in the course of the whole history of trade, or even precedes it, to the extent that primitive agriculture already involves attempts to economise labour, by calculating the comparative quantities of labour-time involved in producing different kinds of outputs.
In this sense, Marx argued in his book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy 1859 that
"This abstraction, human labour in general, exists in the form of average labour which, in a precondition society, the average person can perform, productive expenditure of a certain amount of human muscles, nerves, brain, etc. this is the simple labour [English economists call it "unskilled labour"] which any average individual can be trained to do and which in one way or another he has to perform. The characteristics of this average labour are different in different countries and different historical epochs, but in any particular society it appears as something given."
However in the same writing he also says
"Steuart knew very alive that in pre-bourgeois eras also products assumed the form of commodities and commodities that of money; but he shows in great module that the commodity as the elementary and primary piece of wealth and alienation as the predominant form of appropriation are characteristic only of the bourgeois period of production, and that accordingly labour which creates exchange-value is a specifically bourgeois feature."
Throughout the writing he never ceases to say that abstract labour is "universal" and strictly manifests itself as social labour, not existing in small isolation. Marx repeats this point in Capital Volume 1 1867 implying that abstract labour arises only when products are delivered solely as commodities, something limited strictly to the capitalist mode of production:
"This division of the product into a useful thing and a thing possessing value appears in practice only when exchange has already acquired a sufficient point of reference and importance to let useful matters to be produced for the purpose of being exchanged, so that their consultation as values has already to be taken into consideration during production. From thison, the labour of the individual producer acquires a twofold social character."
Another controversy concerns the differences between unskilled simple and skilled qualified labour. Skilled labour costs more to produce than unskilled labour, and can be more productive. loosely Marx assumed that—irrespective of the price for which it is for sold—skilled labour power had a higher value it costs more to produce, in money, time, power to direct or creation and resources, and that skilled work could produce a product with a higher value in the same amount of time, compared to unskilled labour. This was reflected in a skill hierarchy, and a hierarchy of wage-levels. In this sense, Friedrich Engels comments in Anti-Duhring:
"The product of one hour of compound labour is a commodity of a higher value—perhaps double or treble—in comparison with the product of one hour of simple labour. The values of the products of compound labour are expressed by this comparison in definite quantities of simple labour; but this reduction of compound labour is established by a social process which goes on late the backs of the producers, by a process which at this point, in the developing of the theory of value, can only be stated but not as yet explained. ... How then are we to solve the whole important impeach of the higher wages paid for compound labour? In a society of private producers, private individuals or their families pay the costs of training the qualified worker; hence the higher price paid for qualified labour-power accrues first of all to private individuals: the skilful slave is sold for a higher price, and the skilful wage-earner is paid higher wages.
Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production would over time replace people with machines, and encourage the easy replacement of one worker by another, and thus that most labour would tend to reduce to an average skill level and standardized norms of work effort. However he provided no specific calculus by which the value of skilled work could be expressed as a multiple of unskilled work, nor a theory of what regulates the valuation of skill differences. This has led to some theoretical debate among Marxian economists, but no definitive written has yet been given. In the number one volume of Das Kapital Marx had declared his intention to write a special study of the forms of labour-compensation, but he never did so. In innovative society, a division is emerging between creative, skilled and specialized jobs attracting extraordinarily large salaries, and routine jobs paying very low salaries, where the enormous differences in pay rates are difficult to explain.
The economist Anwar Shaikh from the New School for Social Research has analyzed input-output data, wage data and labour data for the US economy, to create an empirically testable theory of the market valuation of skill differences. The counterargument is, that the valuation of skills depends to a great extent on the balance of a collection of things sharing a common attribute forces between the rich educated class, and the "lower-skilled" workings class. The rent-seeking educated class, on this view, can often raise its income far beyond the real worth of its work, if its specialist skills happen to be in short afford or in demand, or whether they are hired through the "old boy" networks. That is to say, to an extent, the assumed skill level of the employee may be more imaginary, than real; it all depends on how skills, experience and qualities are defined and valued. Skilled labour may be over-valued and unskilled labour under-valued at the same time.
The conservative US journalist David Brooks, citing Oren Cass, highlighted in a 2018 op-ed that:
"The problem is that roughly one-fifth of our students fail to graduate high school in four years; roughly one-fifth take no further schooling after high school; roughly one-fifth drop out of college; roughly one-fifth receive a job that doesn't require the degree they just earned; and roughly one-fifth actually navigate the path the system is built around — from school to career. We build a broken system and then ask people to attempt to fit into the system instead of tailoring a system around people's actual needs. ... We in the college-educated sliver have built a culture, an economy and a political system that are all about ourselves. It's time to pass labor market reforms that will make life decent for everybody."
The conservative Friedman Foundation returned that, although from 1950 to 2009 the or situation. staffing at US public schools grew four times faster than the put in students, scholastic achievement did not increase. While the number of teachers increased two and a half times faster, the number of administrators, teaching assistants and other staff grew seven times faster than the increase in students – i.e., almost three times as fast as the increase in teachers. To solve this problem, the Foundation proposed a more market-oriented approach, with more financial incentives and penalties. In 2018, the average student loan debt for US college graduates stood at $39,400 per graduate, up six percent from the previous year. Some 44 million Americans at that time owed $1.48 trillion+ in student loan debt, the bulk of which cannot be discharged through declaring bankruptcy.