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In Das Kapital Marx normally thinks of the quantity of labour that determines product-value as the ratio between the average total amount of labour-time required to produce a reproducible good, and the corresponding average amount of labour required to produce a unit of gold (see also gold standard).
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 within the (capitalist) mode of production.
Consequently, labour power may be hired not "because it creates more value than it costs to buy", but simply because it conserves the value of a capital asset which, if this labour did not occur, would decline in value by an even greater amount than the labour cost involved in maintaining its value; or because it is a necessary expense which ...
Labor-power might be seen as a stock which can produce a flow of labor. Labor, not labor power, is the key factor of production for Marx and the basis for earlier economists' labor theory of value. The hiring of labor power only results in the production of goods or services ("use-values") when organized and regulated (often by the "management ...
Marx concludes that as value is determined by labour, and as profit is the appropriated surplus value remaining after paying wages, that the maximum profit is set by the minimum wage necessary to sustain labour, but is in turn adjusted by the overall productive powers of labour using given tools and machines, the length of the workday, the ...
Adam Smith held that, in a primitive society, the amount of labor put into producing a good determined its exchange value, with exchange value meaning, in this case, the amount of labor a good can purchase. However, according to Smith, in a more advanced society the market price is no longer proportional to labor cost since the value of the ...
Postone examines the fact that abstract labor is not (concrete) labor in general but has a unique social dimension that cannot be derived from (concrete) labor as such: it mediates a new, quasi-objective form of social interdependence. Abstract labor is a historically specific mediating function; it is the content or 'substance' of value. Labor ...
The immediate result of this is that the value of a given item tends to decrease, because the labour time necessary to produce it becomes less. In a given amount of time, labour produces more items, but each unit has less value; the total value created per time remains the same.