Subject of labor

Marxism
Part of a series on

Theoretical works Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Theses on Feuerbach The German Ideology The Communist Manifesto The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy Das Kapital Dialectics of Nature
Concepts Dialectical materialism Historical materialism Marx's method Scientific socialism Socialism Communist society Proletariat Bourgeoisie
Economics Capital (accumulation) Asiatic mode of production Capitalist mode of production Crisis theory Commodity Exploitation Mode of production Law of value Socialist mode of production Surplus product Surplus value Value-form Wage labor
Sociology Alienation Base and superstructure Bourgeoisie Class Class consciousness Class struggle Commodity fetishism Cultural hegemony Exploitation Human nature Ideology Immiseration Proletariat Private property Relations of production Reification Working class
History Historical materialism Historical determinism Anarchism and Marxism Dictatorship of the proletariat Primitive capital accumulation Proletarian revolution Proletarian internationalism World revolution Stateless communism
Philosophy Marxist geography Marxist humanism Marxist literary criticism Marxist philosophy of nature Philosophy in the Soviet Union Young Marx Open Marxism
Variants Classical Orthodox Trotskyism Marxism–Leninism Marxism–Leninism–Maoism Feminist Western Autonomism Analytical Libertarian Neo-Marxism Post-Marxism Instrumental Structural
Movements Anti-Revisionism Situationist International De Leonism Impossibilism
People Karl Marx Friedrich Engels Karl Kautsky Eduard Bernstein James Connolly Georgi Plekhanov Rosa Luxemburg Vladimir Lenin Leon Trotsky Chen Duxiu Che Guevara Mao Zedong Louis Althusser György Lukács Karl Korsch Antonio Gramsci Antonie Pannekoek Rudolf Hilferding Guy Debord Fredy Perlman more...
Socialism portal Communism portal Philosophy portal

Subject of labor, or object of labor, is a concept in Marxist political economy that refers to "everything to which man's labor is applied." (Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R., 1957) The subject of labor may be materials provided directly by nature like timber or coal, or materials that have been modified by labor. In the latter case, the subject of labor (e.g., yarn in a textile mill or semi-conductor chips in a computer assembly factory) are called raw materials. ^[1]

The subject of labor is one of three basic factors of the production process (Marx, 1967, p 174), along with human labor, and the means of labor (tools and infrastructure used to transform the subject of labor).

The subject of labor and the means of labor comprise the means of production of society (Institute of Economics, 1957).

Subject of labor is sometimes called object of labor (e.g., Sheptulin, 1978). In both cases, the term refers to what is being worked on.

References

Institute of Economics of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1957). Political Economy: A Textbook. London: Lawrence and Wishart.

Marx, Karl (1867 | 1967). Capital Vol. I. New York: International Publishers. Internet copy.

Sheptulin, A. P. (1978). Marxist-Leninist Philosophy. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Notes

↑ This usage of the term "raw materials" is given in, for instance, Capital, Part III, Chap. 7

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Saturday, October 31, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.