Abstract labour and concrete labour

Distinction made by Karl Marx
Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular activity that has a specific useful effect within the (capitalist) mode of production.

As economically valuable worktime, human labour is spent to add value to products or assets (thereby conserving their capital value, and/or transferring value from inputs to outputs). In this sense, labour is an activity which creates/maintains economic value pure and simple, which could be realized as a sum of money once labour's product is sold or acquired by a buyer. The value creating ability of labour is most clearly visible when all labour is stopped. If all labour is withdrawn, the value of the capital assets worked with will normally deteriorate, and in the end, if labour is permanently withdrawn, nothing will be left except a ghost town situation. As a useful activity of a particular kind, human labour can have a useful effect in producing particular tangible products which are used by others, or by the producers themselves. In this sense, labour is an activity which creates use values, i. e. tangible products, results or effects which can be used or consumed. The creation of use values is highlighted, when goods and services of poor quality are created, which are not supplied on time and mainly useless to the consumer. Labour must be applied to produce usable products, regardless of how much they are sold for, otherwise there are no use values. If labour produces useless products or results, it is simply a waste of labour time. So, Marx argues that human work is both (1) an activity which, by its useful effect, helps to create particular kinds of products, and (2) in an economic sense a value forming activity that, if it is productively applied, can help create more value than there was before. If an employer hires labour, the employer thinks both about the value that the labour can add within his business, and about how useful the labour service will be for his business operations. That is, the right kind of work not only needs to get done, but it needs to get done in a way that it helps the employer to make money. If the labour makes no net addition to new value produced, then the employer makes no money from it, and the labour will be only an expense to him. If the labour is only a net expense (overhead), then it is commercially speaking unproductive labour. Yet it may be very necessary to employ this unproductive labour, if, without its performance, considerable capital value would be lost from the employer's financial investments, or if business would fail without it. That is, labour may be very necessary to maintain capital value, even if it does not actually add value to capital, and does not directly add to net profit. So, the employer also buys unproductive labour because the employer's costs in this respect are lower than the loss of value that would occur, if he did not employ unproductive labour to maintain capital value, and to prevent loss of capital value. For example, cleaning work might seem a very menial and low value activity, but if business equipment fails, customers stay away, and the staff get sick or hurt, it costs the business a lot of extra money. However, Marx posited abstract labor, all labor power, as homogeneous, productive labor due to the social nature of value. Labor power, whether managerial or otherwise, when exchanged directly with capital, is included in any calculation of the average socially necessary labor time for production of a specific commodity, and is still represented by variable capital and therefore value adding capital.

Another controversy concerns the differences between unskilled (simple) and skilled (qualified) labour. Skilled labour costs more to produce than unskilled labour, and can be more productive. Generally Marx assumed that—irrespective of the price for which it is sold—skilled labour power had a higher value (it costs more to produce, in money, time, energy and resources), and that skilled work could produce a product with a higher value in the same amount of time, compared to unskilled labour. This was reflected in a skill hierarchy, and a hierarchy of wage levels. In this sense, Friedrich Engels comments in Anti Duhring:

Marx believed that the capitalist mode of production would over time replace people with machines, and encourage the easy replacement of one worker by another, and thus that most labour would tend to reduce to an average skill level and standardized norms of work effort. However he provided no specific calculus by which the value of skilled work could be expressed as a multiple of unskilled work, nor a theory of what regulates the valuation of skill differences. This has led to some theoretical debate among Marxian economists, but no definitive solution has yet been given. In the first volume of Das Kapital Marx had declared his intention to write a special study of the forms of labour compensation, but he never did so. In contemporary society, a division is emerging between creative, skilled and specialized jobs attracting extraordinarily large salaries, and routine jobs paying very low salaries, where the enormous differences in pay rates are difficult to explain. The economist Anwar Shaikh from the New School for Social Research has analyzed input output data, wage data and labour data for the US economy, to create an empirically testable theory of the market valuation of skill differences. The counterargument is, that the valuation of skills depends to a great extent on the balance of class forces between the rich educated class, and the "lower skilled" working class. The rent seeking educated class, on this view, can often raise its income far beyond the real worth of its work, if its specialist skills happen to be in short supply or in demand, or if they are hired through the "old boy" networks. That is to say, to an extent, the assumed skill level of the employee may be more imaginary, than real; it all depends on how skills, experience and qualifications are defined and valued. Skilled labour may be over valued and unskilled labour under valued at the same time.

In his book Crack Capitalism, John Holloway considers abstract labour as the most radical foundational category of Marx's theory, and therefore he recommends the struggle against abstract labour as the centrepiece of the political struggle against capitalism. The British computer scientist Paul Cockshott in 2013 wrote a piece critical of the German Marxist academic Michael Heinrich who, Cockshott argued, wrongly reinterpreted the concept of abstract labour so that it is no longer a scientifically testable concept.