But in Marx’s terminology, the answer is definitely that you sell your labour-power, not your labour. The reason he made the distinction is what I outlined above - to attempt to explain the relationship between labour and value. You can see it as jargon developed to answer a disciplinary question of political economy, and the reference points were Smith and Ricardo.

Labour can only be quantified in terms of abstract labour time, ie as a proportion of society’s total socially necessary labour time. It is meaningless to say that labour has a value, because value is measured in terms of abstract labour. It would be like trying to measure a metre or weigh a pound. Therefore labour as such cannot be sold.

This leaves the question of what the wage is. Marx related it to the value of labour-power, which is the potential-to-labour, which is what workers sell. You can say labour-power has a value, in the sense that it takes a certain proportion of society’s socially necessary labour time to feed, clothe, and house the workers and their families, and thus reproduce the labour-power from day to day and generation to generation.

So the distinction between labour and labour-power explains how workers get paid the value of their labour-power, and yet the labour they perform creates a surplus over this value. That is, workers are not paid based on what they create, but based on what sustains them.

I think this is especially confusing today because in the political economy of Marx’s day it was generally believed that workers were paid at a subsistence level, whereas today there is clearly a large gap between biological subsistence and the wage. So certainly other factors are involved in determining the value of labour-power. But I think the distinction still makes sense.

Thanks for that. I agree with you there’s much of a substantive disagreement here. Beyond that I’ll have to think more about this and come back to it later.

For now, here’s a paraphrase of the email discussion that led to the example I quoted in the post. Somebody said “Workers sell our labor power.” Someone else said “I work for a living. I sell my labor, not my labor power.” A third person said, “What’s the difference and why should I care?” The thing I quoted is one response to that question. How would you answer it?

take care,
Nate

Well it is a definitional issue and not a substantial disagreement.

Yes obviously Marx is working at a high level of abstraction, especially in the opening chapters of v1. But the question is what is being abstracted out, and I don’t think markets are, because it is the very fact that the division of labour is mediated by markets in a capitalist society that allows ‘value’ to have any meaning. Marx starts with the commodity but in an abstract sense in which the commodity form internalises general social relations. As David Harvey puts it in Limits to Capital (2006 edition, pxx), “Value is an internal relation within the commodity. It internalises the whole geography of labour processes, commodity production and realisation, and capital accumulation in the space-time of the world market.” So it’s not abstracting from markets, markets are necessary for the commodity to even exist. You can say Marx deals with a commodity abstracted from the particularities of any specific market, but ‘the market’ is there right from chapter 1.

I think Marx makes the distinction between labour and labour-power because he is trying to solve a puzzle of classical economics. There was a confusion about the relation between labour time and the value of the commodity produced. ‘Labour commanded’ by the commodity seemed to be greater than ‘labour embodied’, i.e. if a worker worked 10 hours to mill a certain amount of flour, he could only buy 80% of the flour he produced. This led Adam Smith to reject a labour theory of value for capitalism, and determine prices on the basis of adding wages, rent and profit. The flaw was that this gave no foothold for working out why profit existed or what quantity it would have.

Ricardo revived the labour theory and explained that the cost of employing labour (wages) was a different concept from the labour embodied in a commodity. Marx developed this idea, explaining that exchange value depended on the socially necessary labour time spent producing the commodity. But he was more specific about what determined the difference between the wage and the product of labour. This is where labour-power comes in. Labour-power itself takes a commodity form (though it is very different from most commodities), in that its value is the cost of reproducing it from day to day. It has no necessary relation to the value produced by that labour.

So overall in any time period part of society’s output will go towards the replenishment of workers (equalling the overall value of labour-power) and the rest will be surplus value. Note that labour has no value, but produces value, while labour-power has a value, but produces no value.

As for the second issue, I don’t make any distinction between a car wash and a statue. They are both commodities, even though the first is not an object. The difference is that I assumed that the car washer was being employed by someone to wash cars, while the statue-maker was selling her own product. So in the first case the car washer sells their labour power to the proprietor, who sells the car wash. If the car washer is working on their own account, they’re in the same boat as the statue maker, but they will still be competing with other car washers run as capitalist businesses in the first sense, so this will still affect their conditions of labour.

I’m in a rush so I need to be brief, sorry if this gives me a clipped tone. I don’t think you can consistently object (using Marx) to an example in abstraction which brackets out details like markets etc. Marx starts with the commodity abstracted from all content, and his example in v1 is an ideal-typical (ie, abstracted) English capitalism. So, again, not a claim about piece wages. I accept ch21 as true for now, but I think the case of one exchange in abstraction (the car wash example) can still be illustrative. I’d like to get clear on labor vs LP here before proceeding to larger more complex cases like piece wages in motion. I’m willing agree that after said proceeding to said cases I may need to modify some claims made here but I’d like to get clear on those claims first. I think this also makes sense with Marx’s exposition - labor power appear at the outset while wages and piece vs time wages come much later in the book.

As for the farmer or sculptor - how is it that they sell a commodity while the car washer sells labor power? Is it because the clean car isn’t an object? Here also I want to bracket out the larger matters of markets and price. This is because I don’t think we disagree on that level really, about how the values of commodities (including labor power) is determined. The issue of labor vs labor power may end up resulting in a difference elsewhere, but I’d like to get clear on that alone first.

cheers,
Nate

I don’t see how these examples can be separated from the stuff on piece-work in Chapter 21. In capitalism one instance of this kind of transaction can’t be taken in abstraction, because all the variables involved are set by the fact of competition and socially necessary labour time, whether the worker is paid by piece or by the hour.

Which the employer tries to impose will be determined by which seems to get the most effort from the worker, and which the worker prefers depends on which requires the least effort or time for the wage. Aglietta’s Theory of Capitalist Regulation ch 2 has some interestng stuff on how this worked out in the 20th century US.

Again, though, the issue is about conflict over intensity of labour, not the distinction between labour and labour-time.

The examples of the sculptor or farmer are examples of petty commodity production, and they are selling commodities, not their labour or labour time. If it is happening in generally capitalist conditions, the prices they get for their goods will be determined just like those for any other commodities, through their competition with other producers - other petty producers or capitalist firms. Their labour will be shaped by the need to meet those norms.

I disagree, but first, how would you explain and illustrate the difference (and why the difference matters) between “the worker sells labor” and “the worker sells labor power”?

Here’s the difference to my mind. If I sell my labor power to someone for a some agreed upon quantity of time (8 hours) at some agreed upon rate ($7 an hour), I’m going to get paid $56 regardless of how hard I work. I’m going to try to work as little as possible during that time, to lower the rate of exploitation low. The buyer of my labor power is going to try to get me to work faster, to raise the rate of exploitation. This conflict exists because I’ve sold my labor power, my ability to work, labor in potentia. The conflict over the rate of exploitiation is a conflict over the actualization of my potential to labor.

If, on the other hand, I’m paid $56 upon the completion of some task, I’m going to try to get the task done as fast as possible, so I have as much time free as possible. There’s no conflict here between buyer and seller over the rate of exploitation, which means no conflict over the degree of actualization of potential labor.

There’s a difference between selling not-yet-actualized-potential and actuality. You could still say that in the latter case I’m selling my labor power, because potentiality is preserved in actuality, but I don’t see what saying that accomplishes, anymore than decribing a car as “the actualized potential for a car.” A question - say somebody lives by making wood statues and selling them in front of her house - or say somebody farms and sells produce out of the back of a pick up truck. Would you say they sell their labor power when a customer buys one of the statues or bag of corn?

(Also, the pair of examples in abstraction - one instance of a transaction - is not a claim about piece wages vs time wages. In each example the exchange isn’t repeated, and price of labor power and length of the working day are bracketed out, different from ch21 of Capital.)

cheers,
Nate

The basis for the distinction between labour and labour-power is that the former is the activity of labour (or, as abstract labour, a portion of society’s division of labour) and labour-power is the potential-to-perform-labour that must be replenished through the wage. So surplus value is the difference between the value of labour-power and the value produced by that labour. I think what your friend is getting at is the struggle over the intensity of labour.