[lbo-talk] Labour and Labour Power

michael perelman michael.perelman3 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 12 18:01:12 PST 2013


German scientists were already working on the science of labor power.

Their intention was to discover ways to reduce the toll of the workplace and to increase productivity. W. S. Jevons took up this research & was reprimanded for it because labor was only supposed to be the sacrifice of labor.

I tell this story in the Invisible Handcuffs.

On Tue, Nov 12, 2013 at 5:53 AM, James Heartfield <james at heartfield.org>wrote:


> Here's a question for the Marx scholars among you.
>
> In different accounts Marx says that he was struggling with the ideas of
> labour and exchange, until he made the distinction between labour and
> labour power. I got the impression that 'labour power' was Marx's own
> coinage. So I was a bit surprised, when reading the the Anti Slavery
> Reporter for Nov 1858, a paper by the secretary of the Anti Slavery
> Society, read at the Second Annual Conference for the Promotion of Social
> Science, a confident reference to the 'labour power' of the emancipated
> West Indians. Chamerovzow was radical, but I think knew nothing of Marx,
> certainly not in 1858. His audience would not have, either. Was the concept
> of Labour Power actually just well known, and Marx used it?
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-- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929

530 898 5321 fax 530 898 5901 http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com



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