Labor Power

Definition

Labor power is where The Mirror of Production locates Marxism's most consequential unexamined form. Baudrillard's claim is not that the concept describes a real capacity wrongly exploited, but that the capacity itself is a product of the system that exploits it: "The system of political economy does not produce only the individual as labor power that is sold and exchanged: it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face", p. 30). Marx's gesture of preserving a use value of labor power alongside its exchange value is therefore the central object of attack: "In fact the use value of labor power does not exist any more than the use value of products or the autonomy of signified and referent. The same fiction reigns in the three orders of production, consumption, and signification" (same section). The exchange value of labor power "is what makes its use value, the concrete origin and end of the act of labor, appear as its 'generic' alibi" (same section) — use value as code effect rather than anthropological bedrock.

Behind the distinction stands a term the book keeps in German to mark its status as an unquestioned postulate: Marxist theory "never challenges human capacity of production (energetic, physical, and intellectual), this productive potential of every man in every society 'of transforming his environment into ends useful for the individual or the society,' this Arbeitsvermögen" (same section). Together with needs, it forms the "double 'generic' face" of universal man, which "is only man as produced by the system of political economy" (same section); and the overdetermination is metaphysical as well as economic: "man is not only quantitatively exploited as a productive force by the system of capitalist political economy, but is also metaphysically overdetermined as a producer by the code of political economy" (same section).

The fork is Baudrillard's name for the exchange-value/use-value split within labor. Marx "deconstructed labor into a double concept of labor power commodity: abstract social labor (exchange value) and concrete labor (use value)" and "insisted on the need to maintain these two aspects in all their force" (ch. I, "Critique of Use Value and Labor Power"); but "this 'concrete' is an abuse of the word. It seems opposed to the abstract at the base of the fork, but in fact the fork itself is what establishes the abstraction. The autonomization of labor is sealed in the play of the two—from the abstract to the concrete, from the qualitative to the quantitative, from the exchange value to the use value of labor" (ch. I, "The Concrete Aspect of Labor: The 'Dialectic' of Quality and Quantity"). Because labor power is defined qualitatively, its capacity to generate value is left as an unexplained given: "There is, moreover, a profound enigma throughout the articulation of Marx's theory: how is surplus value born? How can labor power, by definition qualitative, generate a measurable actualization?" (same section). Use value "plays a dirty trick on Marxist theory" (ch. V, "Marxist Theory and the Workers' Movement: The Concept of Class").

The political stake is the wage form. On Baudrillard's reading, the critique of alienation-by-sale represses the more radical hypothesis: "And in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital. It convinces men that they are alienated by the sale of their labor power, thus censoring the much more radical hypothesis that they might be alienated as labor power, as the 'inalienable' power of creating value by their labor" (ch. I, "Man's Double 'Generic' Face", pp. 30–31). Against the wage earner's self-image — "the free worker finds his identity in the mirror of his labor power" (ch. IV, "The Slave") — the slave relation is said to preserve something the wage relation liquidates: it is analyzed retroactively "starting from the status of the salaried worker," and "what is lost in this process is everything that is exchanged in the master-slave relation and everything not reducible to the alienation-exploitation of a labor power" (same section). Hence domination is not exploitation: it "does not involve the objectification of the dominated, but an obligation that always carries an element of reciprocity" (ch. IV, "The Slave", p. 95), and freedom appears as interiorized separation — "he is alienated not insofar as he sells his labor power, but insofar as he is an owner, 'disposing' of it as if it were his own goods" (same section, p. 95). What remains outside the wage-form is the symbolic remainder (see artisanal-mode, symbolic-exchange).

Key Thinkers

• Jean Baudrillard — the critique's author: labor power as produced by the system; Arbeitsvermögen as the untested postulate; the "fork"; "Marxism assists the cunning of capital" (1973/1975).
• Karl Marx — author of the double concept of labor power (abstract social labor / concrete labor), credited with the discovery of abstract social labor and charged with leaving its use value in place as the horizon of value.
• Herbert Marcuse (not yet paged) — cited for the metaphysical sanctification of labor ("labor is an ontological concept of human existence as such"), the line Baudrillard extends into the ethic of labor (see ethic-of-labor-and-esthetic-of-play).
• Adam Smith and the classical tradition (not yet paged) — the "labor" concept Marx deconstructed into the labor-power commodity.
• Sigmund Freud — not a figure of this page, but the parallel case: repression and the unconscious are discussed as the same kind of exported postulate (see unconscious).

Related Concepts

• use-value — the term whose "horizon" status the labor-power analysis repeats: use value as the system's internal alibi.
• mirror-of-production — the identity the worker finds "in the mirror of his labor power."
• productivism — the political consequence: production as form re-emerging in revolutionary discourse.
• artisanal-mode — where Baudrillard argues the wage contract itself is an abstraction (domestic labor, personal obligation).
• symbolic-exchange — the real rupture is said to lie "not between 'abstract' labor and 'concrete' labor, but between symbolic exchange and work."
• species-essentiality — the "double 'generic' face" as a species essence produced rather than found.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• The Mirror of Production (Baudrillard 1975) — the critique of labor power as the concept of labor: "it produces the very conception of labor power as the fundamental human potential" (ch. I, p. 30); "in this Marxism assists the cunning of capital" (ch. I, pp. 30–31); "the real rupture is not between 'abstract' labor and 'concrete' labor, but between symbolic exchange and work" (ch. I, p. 42); and the slave/wage-labor contrast in which "domination, as distinct from alienation and exploitation… always carries an element of reciprocity" (ch. IV, p. 95).
• Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).

Open Questions

• If use value is a code effect all the way down, how does Baudrillard distinguish the symbolic remainder from a hidden use value he has just denied? The slave's reciprocity is the test case.
• The Arbeitsvermögen is named as an untested postulate: does the book anywhere argue that no trans-historical capacity of transformation exists, or only that its universalist formulation is ideological?
• Is the surplus-value "enigma" a genuine gap in Marx or a demand that a qualitative term produce a quantity — i.e., a category mistake the critique itself imposes?
• What follows politically from the wage-form argument? If workers are "alienated as labor power," then demands around the sale of labor power (wages, conditions) are said to miss the point — a conclusion that the book's own reading of the workers' movement problematizes.