The Skilled Labor Reduction Problem

VERY BIG STUMBLING BLOCK to most people who study early part of Marx's Capital is so-called skilled labor problem, which deals with of skilled labor to a multiple of simple labor, or of average labor, or of unskilled labor. Marx says that ' 'experience shows that this is constantly being made and that reductions are established by 'a social process that goes on behind backs of producers, and, consequently, appears to be fixed by custom.1 As to what this invisible social process consists of, he is silent. In his earlier work, Critique of Political Economy, he refers to the laws governing this reduction but postpones his consideration of these laws to some other time and place.2 Later on in Capital he apparently does an about-face to make short shrift of whole problem by saying that for capitalist mode of production, distinction between skilled and unskilled labor is, for most part, pure illusion or a reflection of senseless traditions and accidental circumstances.3 Among other things this paper will attempt to explain apparent contradiction in Marx's view of problem. We begin with a brief recapitulation of Marx's concept of value, or commodity-value, as contrasted with exchange-value and as related to general labor. In developing this concept Marx applied Hegel's doctrine of essence and appearance. Value, or commodityvalue, is related to exchange-value as essence is related to form of phenomenal apearance or manifestation, as, for instance, H2O molecule (en masse) is related to its forms of appearance, water, steam, and ice. The innumerable exchange-values (exchange-ratios) of a commodity are phenomenal forms of manifestation or ap

Capital (architecture · Capitalism · Commodity · Contradiction · Doctrine · Economics · Epistemology · Exchange value · Financial capital · Full employment · Hegelianism · Law and economics · Market economy · Means of production · Neoclassical economics · Political science · Politics · Surplus value · Unemployment · Value (mathematics · Law · Philosophy · Political Economy and Marxism