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 ("Wertverhältnis" in German). 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.
Evolutionary or historically specific For ultraleftist Marxists, abstract labour is an economic category 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 cost or earnings potential. Thus Professor John Weeks claims that The logical implication of this ultraleftist interpretation is, that if capitalism is destroyed (by the revolutionary Marxist Party and the working class), then abstract labour is also destroyed and eradicated. Other Marx-scholars, such as
Makoto Itoh, take a more evolutionary view (like Marx did and archaeologists do). 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 already argued in his book
A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) that In the same text, Marx comments that Originally, in ancient society and medieval society ("premodern" or "pre-bourgeois" society), commodity production
co-existed with
subsistence production, a situation of "
partial commodity production" (see also
simple commodity production). When Marx discusses the origin and evolution of exchange, he notes that: Such a division of labour featuring partial commodity production is already achieved in many different
precapitalist societies, and consequently the category of abstract labour already existed in precapitalist societies. However, only under conditions of
generalized commodity production in a capitalist society does abstract labour become a truly "universal" characteristic of production - because the vast majority of inputs and outputs of production are tradeable goods and services regulated by values and price-levels in competitive markets. The category of abstract labour is fully realized because it becomes an objectified quantity.
Skilled labour 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. Generally Marx assumed that—irrespective of the price for which it is sold—skilled
labour power had a higher value (it costs more to produce, in money, time, energy 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: 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 solution has yet been given. In the first 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 contemporary 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 economic theory of the market valuation of skill differences. The counterargument is, that the valuation of skills in a heavily bureaucratized education system depends to a great extent on the
balance of class forces between the rich educated class, and the "lower-skilled" working class. The
rent-seeking educated class, on this view, can often raise its income far beyond the real worth of its work, if they occupy a privileged position, if its specialist skills happen to be in short supply or in demand, or if 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 qualifications are defined and valued by privileged professionals whose rules reward their own kind the most. Skilled labour may be over-valued and unskilled labour under-valued at the same time. ==Criticism==