ABSTRACT
The specificity of commodity producing labour is that it acquires its character of social labour only in the exchange of labour products. This may explain why Marxian theorists have not distinguished well abstract labour as a social form of living labour from abstract labour as incorporated in the commodity and therefore have suggested interpretations that bring the labour theory of value closer to Ricardo than to Marx (1). Since the forms of value exposed in the beginning of Capital are not correctly differentiated from the labour that produces value, it has not been seen that this exposition does not deal with a supposed simple mode of production. The forms of value exposed relate in fact to simple forms of circulation that are not tied up to any particular mode of production (2). Yet economic anthropology shows precisely how exchange of commodities takes infinite and complex forms in primitive societies and creates a sphere of objectified relationships between different communities (3). In a very different vein Turgot shows on the basis of utilitarian principles how the measure of exchange by labour time eventually imposes itself to traders as the sphere of exchange widens. And if he shied away from developing a genuine theory of labour value, it was simply because he remained a prisoner of his individualistic postulates (4). Abstract labour in Marx is not a mere physiological quantity but the social quality that individuals’ living labour acquires when society reproduces itself on the basis of commodities exchange. Therefore abstract labour relates to the process of abstraction of social labour from the concrete activity of individual producers (5). Given that abstract labour as the quality of social labour presents itself in the value of commodity, its fetish character comes precisely from the fact that social activity appears in the form of a thing, which, in the developed figure of the interest-bearing capital, appears to be really living (6).
