Writing Labor's History
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2930948 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Stanley Aronowitz (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1990 |
| Issue | 25/26 |
| Pages | 171 |
| Publication date | 1990-01-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Text (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951 |
| Publisher | JSTOR (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/466246 |
| OpenAlex | W2318469044 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 5 |
The history of capitalism has, typically, been written as a series of narratives unified by the themes of accumulation: mercantile and imperialist interests seeking fresh sources of investment; the scientific and technological revolutions that have driven growth; international rivalries over territory and labor supplies and the multitude of conflicts among fractions of capital that take political forms, such as the struggles for power among capital's personifications or wars mark this history. In these accounts, workers enter the theater of history as abstract labor, factors of production, dependent variables in the grand narratives of crisis and renewal. Writing modern history from capital's standpoint has not been exclusively the wont of liberal and conservative historians whose conceptions may be traced to their worldview. Those who adopted marxist perspectives also wrote such histories and their work seemed to be grounded in no less an authority than Marx himself. After all Capital may be plausibly read as the story of the penetration of the commodity form into all corners of the social world, the transformation of use value into exchange value which, as labor-power is the movement from concrete to abstract labor. Marx intended this account to be a critique of political economy, not a revolution in economics that is, he intended to demonstrate that the epistemological foundation of economic science was the standpoint of capital. That his work should not be construed as an alternative descriptive science in correspondence to an objective material reality, completely eludes the literal-minded. There is no detailed treatment of concrete labor, of use value. In Marx's discourse, concrete labor is the raw material from which the real abstraction is derived just as exchange value is presupposed by use value. But, the three volumes of Capital are written from the point of view of capitalist accumulation. While concrete labor as a use value constitutes the necessary condition for capital formation, this is not Marx's concern in these texts
Capitalism · Commodity · Economics · Exchange value · Literature · Market economy · Marxist philosophy · Narrative · Neoclassical economics · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Law · Political Economy and Marxism
| Citations per year | 0.17 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1997 - 2014 (18) |
| Highly cited | No |