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Labour power (German: Arbeitskraft; French: force de travail) is the capacity to do work, a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do work, i.e. labour power, and the physical act of working, i.e. labour. [1]
The worker is alienated from the means of production via two forms: wage compulsion and the imposed production content. The worker is bound to unwanted labour as a means of survival, labour is not "voluntary but coerced" (forced labour). The worker is only able to reject wage compulsion at the expense of their life and that of their family.
However, Marx was always clear that under capitalism, labour was something inhuman, and dehumanising. "labour is external to the worker – i.e., does not belong to his essential being; that he, therefore, does not confirm himself in his work, but denies himself, feels miserable and not happy, does not develop free mental and physical energy ...
Long before that, wage labour and a working class had existed without any notion of a formal contract between legal equals. Law regarding slavery likewise concerned mainly rules for relations between slave-holders (buying and selling, warranties, etc.), and have never been required for slavery to exist.
Productive forces, productive powers, or forces of production (German: Produktivkräfte) is a central idea in Marxism and historical materialism.. In Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels' own critique of political economy, it refers to the combination of the means of labor (tools, machinery, land, infrastructure, and so on) with human labour power.
Labour process theory (LPT) is a Marxist theory of the organization of work under capitalism.Researchers in critical management studies, organization studies, and related disciplines have used LPT to explain antagonistic relationships between employers and employees in capitalist economies, with a particular focus on problems of deskilling, worker autonomy, and managerial control at the point ...
the definition of productive and unproductive labour is not static, but evolving; in the course of capitalist development, the division of labour is increasingly modified, to make more and more labour productive in the capitalistic sense, for example through marketisation and privatisation, value-based management, and Taylorism.
The difference between a benefit and exploitation despite their various shared features is a difference between their counterfactual presuppositions, meaning that in an exploitation there is a voluntary bilateral transfer of unequally valued items because the possessors of both items would voluntarily make the transfer if the items to be ...