Karl Marx’s Concept Of Abstract Labour

Unlike traditional Marxists who focus on concrete labour,I try to study the other aspect of capitalist labour,abstract labour.After analyzing the complex meanings of Marx’s concept of "abstraction" one by one,I define abstraction in relation to abstract labour as real abstract.Around the critique of abstract labour,we can put forward three kinds of social critical theories,namely the critique of identification,critique of fetishism and critique of capital.This thesis includes five parts.The first part is the introduction.The main body consists of three chapters.Chapter One strives to correct a traditional view of Marx’s labour doctrine,which I define as "anthropology of labour".It mainly originates from two classic texts Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts in 1844 and German Ideolgy,although philosophical thoughts reflected by them contradict to each other.With the development of Marx’s study on political economy,abstract labour,which is previously neglected,gradually occupies a more and more important position.It is by mean of this concept that Marx found out the theory of dual characters of the labour,which "is crucial to an understanding of political economy".Chapter Two focuses on the analysis of the concept "abstraction".By reading texts from periods,I find that there are at least three kinds of abstraction for Marx:the first is empirical abstraction.As opposed to perceptual concrete,it refers to a kind of epistemological method that reduces miscellaneous individuals to general rule or general essential stipulation.That’s also the way empirical science works.By this way(influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach),Marx transcended Hegel’s speculative philosophy,and converted to general materialism.The second is scientific abstraction,which is opposed to conceptual concrete.In An Introduction to Critique of Political Economics,Marx put forward a research method of political economy,namely "from abstraction to concrete",and thought that the concrete category,reached through abstraction,already contained rich contents of social relations.The third is real abstraction.Differing from popular ideas,I think that there are two kinds of real abstraction among Marx’s works,namely abstraction of production and abstraction of exchange.And the latter happens to be my research object.In chapter Three,on the basis of abstract labour,I will reconsider the concepts of commodity,money and capital to construct a systematic critical theory:the critique of identification,critique of fetishism and critique of capital.The last part is the conclusion.I will come back to Marx’s labour theory and reflect his idea of labour liberation therein.