The Labour Process I
Tony Andréani & Sarah Erden
What the paper says
This chapter argues that (concrete) labour is the only truly productive force and that the means of labour (tools, technologies, science) are no more than the “measures” of this force. Through their labour, human beings can transform their natural environment, but they do not dominate it; on the contrary, it is the natural environment that dominates them in that it provides them with limited resources and is capable of upsetting their living conditions, either independently of their will or increasingly as a result of the very consequences of their actions. This natural environment also sets biological limits which no transhumanism can transgress. The natural movement of concrete labour is one of appropriation, but it transforms into its opposite when it is subjected to the effects of social domination: this is the deepest meaning of the concept of alienation. And this disappropriation has consequences on its own productivity, in the Marxian sense of the term. Indeed, technologies are never neutral: they are sorted and shaped by the dominant social system. All these developments stand in opposition to the traditional conception of “productive forces” that has prevailed in standard Marxism.
Evidence weight
Balanced mode · F 0.40 / M 0.15 / V 0.05 / R 0.40
| F · citation impact | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
| M · momentum | 0.50 × 0.15 = 0.07 |
| V · venue signal | 0.50 × 0.05 = 0.03 |
| R · text relevance † | 0.50 × 0.4 = 0.20 |
† Text relevance is estimated at 0.50 on the detail page — for your query’s actual relevance score, open this paper from a search result.