Living and Dead Labor

"Political economy is not a science of the relation of things to things, as was thought by vulgar economists, nor of people to things, as was asserted by the theory of marginal utility, but of the relations of people to people in the process of production."

Isaak Illich Rubin

When we think of a house, we think of a physical structure meant to protect us from the weather and give us some privacy. It can have various characteristics. It can be a single-family suburban bungalow with a lawn and garage, a dark apartment in the basement of a block of brick row houses, a room halfway up a reinforced concrete housing tower, a trailer by the edge of town, a sprawling mansion by the beach with a tennis court and heated pool.

As physical structures, different kinds of houses are worth different amounts. The value of any one of them appears to be another characteristic of the house, just like whether or not it has a garage or working smoke detectors. On the basis of this value they are interchangeable. One mansion by the beach might have the same value as ten suburban houses and fifty basement apartments. Value, the thing they have in common, is not a measure of their usefulness.

The fact that a mansion (as a physical structure) is worth fifty times more money than a basement apartment, is not because it provides fifty times more shelter or fifty times more privacy or because it has 25 working smoke detectors to the basement apartment's single smoke detector that works half the time. This is even more clear when a house is compared to other commodities, like a luxury car or a box of pasta. A basement apartment might be worth half as much as a luxury car and thousands of times what a box of pasta is worth. But it would be completely ridiculous to say that this is because a basement apartment provides half as much protection from the weather and privacy as a luxury car provides ability to get from place to place quickly and in style — or that people living in the basement apartment value the shelter their apartment provides several thousand times more than they value the ability of the pasta to be turned into a tasty dinner.

If a mansion is worth ten times what a single family bungalow is worth, it's because it takes ten times as much work to make one. If it takes a specific mix of construction workers six months to build the bungalow, it would take the same workers 5 years to build the mansion, or if the mansion needed to be built in 6 months, it would take ten times as many workers. The ratios in which different types of houses could be exchanged is based on the amount of labor time that is necessary to make them (where the skilled laborer's time is worth more than the unskilled laborer's).

When a sider fixes plastic siding on the exterior walls of a bungalow, he is making a real change to the usefulness of a particular commodity — he is making the house waterproof (and slightly better insulated). At the same time he is adding value to the commodity — his work takes part in forming an average for the amount of work necessary to put siding on a bungalow in a particular society. It doesn't matter how much time and effort he puts into putting up the siding on this or that particular house. His work adds value to the house based on a socially necessary average amount of work time the task should take. If, next year, a new, faster method for fixing plastic siding to houses becomes widespread, the value of all houses with plastic siding will fall, whether or not they were made using that method.

There is constant exchange of different kinds of commodities. Commodities are produced by separate specialized enterprises. Houses and X-rays are created by completely different work processes and have completely different uses. Still X-ray technicians need houses and construction workers often need X-rays taken. Value appears as the thing that makes a social relation between them possible — it links the activity of separate commodity producers. The products of their work can be exchanged for definite amounts of money, which can then be used to buy any other commodity.

Value attaches itself to useful things, and these things become commodities and exchangeable. In this way, the work of the X-ray tech is made interchangeable with the work of the construction worker, not as the creation of a specific useful thing, but as a process of value creation.

Things appear to have value because of the social relations between people producing different useful things. Value exists when, in order for useful things to get from the people who make them to the people who need them, they have to pass through the intermediate step of being bought and sold (or bartered or otherwise exchanged).

When the buyer looks at a house, he sees what it can be used for — a warm place to sleep, to make food, to have a party. For the seller, the house is a blob of value waiting to be turned into money. He doesn't care about the heated pool and the outdoor barbecue, except as a hook to get someone to buy the house. Like any commodity seller, he's in it for the money.

But simply buying and selling houses at their value doesn't make money. It just means that the value stored up in a house is turned into value stored up in money, which could then be traded for other commodities. But the owner of a construction company is not just a commodity seller. He's a capitalist.

In a capitalist society everyone's activity is interchangeable and we are all equal as people with commodities for sale. At the same time most of us have nothing to sell but our ability to work. Everything that is necessary to make useful things is owned and controlled by a class of capitalists — it is their private property.

X-ray techs can't take X-rays without access to expensive X-ray machines in the hospital, owned by the hospital's shareholders. Cement masons can't lay the foundations for houses without access to expensive concrete mixing trucks. Those of us who don't have property we can make money from are forced to sell our ability to work to a capitalist — we become wage workers.

Our ability to work is like any other commodity in that its value is based on the value of all the things that go into making it. We have to be paid enough to pay for all the food, clothes, rent, phone service, education and training, healthcare, gasoline, liquor, and sleeping pills we need to keep showing up every morning able to work. Our ability to work is not like other commodities in that it creates new value.

A box of nails and a pile of two-by-fours come into a construction site with a value based on the amount of work necessary to make them and transport them to the site. They are the combined product of workers in a...