Marx and Living Labour

254 Pages·2013·2.607 MB·English

by  Baronian, Laurent

Marx and Living Labour
From his early economic works on, Marx conceived the labour of any kind of
society as a set of production activities and analysed all the historical modes of
production as specific ways of distributing and exchanging these activities. Polit-
ical economy on the contrary considers the labour only under the form of its
product, and the exchange of products as commodities as the unique form of
social labour exchange. For Marx, insofar as the labour creating value represents
a specific mode of exchanging the society’s living labour, general and abstract
labour cannot not only be defined as the substance or measure unit of the com-
modity, as in Smith or Ricardo, but foremost as an expense of living labour, i.e.
of nerves, muscles, brain, etc. Hence the twofold nature of living labour, as a
concrete activity producing a use value and an expense of human labour in
general producing exchange value. Marx himself claimed that this twofold
nature of labour creating value was its main and most important contribution to
economic science. This book aims at showing how the category of living labour
both determines the original categories and economic laws in Capital and consti-
tutes the profound innerspring of Marx’s critique of political economy. The role
and function of living labour is highlighted by dealing with: the difference
between Marx and Classics’ theories of labour value; money and the problem of
its integration in economic analysis, especially in Keynes; the transition from
feudalism to capitalism; the theory of capital through a discussion on the Cam-
bridge controversy and the transformation problem; the labour process and the
principles of labour management; unemployment and overpopulation; the for-
mulas of capital in the history of economic thought; finally, an interpretation of
the current crisis based on Marx’s conception of overaccumulation and specula-
tion after having distinguished it from underconsumption and stagnation theories
of crises.
Laurent Baronian is Assistant Professor in Economics at the Université Paris 3
Sorbonne-Nouvelle, France.
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