Automation, Work, and Ideology: The Next Industrial Revolution and the Transformation of "Labor"

and Concrete Labor Capitalist society is characterized by how it makes individual reproduction and society’s reproduction dependent upon the interdependent labor of workers in a division of labor that now spans the globe. At the core of this interdependence is the unique socially mediating function labor takes in capitalism. Trenkle (1998b) notes how the nature of labor in capitalist society is dependent upon its social context to derive meaning (pg. 1). Labor in capitalism is only considered labor if it “materializes in the abstract-social context of the production of commodities and some wage is awarded for the carrying out” (Trenkle, 1998b, pg. 1). What Marx calls abstract labor refers to when selling labor power for a certain amount of time in 93 Of course, there are kinds of work that exist “outside” of what capitalism considers labor, because what counts as labor in capitalism is labor time expenditure in exchange for the universal equivalent, money. The most common example of labor “outside” of capitalism is unpaid domestic labor, which is crucial for social reproduction but nonetheless does not count as labor for capital. See, Scholz, (2009) Patriarchy and Commodity Society: Gender without the Body. 186 exchange for a wage that can be used to exchange for commodities is the primary means of social reproduction that is made general across the whole of society. When this system is generalized, labor takes on an abstract socially mediating character it did not have in previous forms of social life. Regardless of what concrete form labor takes, be it productive labor, service labor, agricultural labor or intellectual labor, the labor has an abstract character because it is remunerated not based on its concrete quality, but by a quantitative measurement of time. Only when capitalism is generalized does remunerated labor time become viewed as a universally valid form of exchange for the products of others. Ultimately, in modern society it is viewed as “natural” that all human beings must to work to survive, but this obscures how this “need” to work is socially created and enforced because of the structuring power of a society where social reproduction is dependent upon acquiring value through labor.

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