Question

What is the homogenization of labor and what evidence do we have as to its existence?

Answer 1

All societies coordinate human labor in order to produce things. The total social product is divided about society. The organization of this production and distribution is the subject of economics. When societies began producing a surplus of this social product a new aspect of distribution and production entered the equation.Under feudalism the social surplus was extracted from peasants by landlords; in a slave system the social surplus is extracted from slaves by slave owners. In these examples the economic act in which the surplus is passed from worker to exploiter is easy to see. Under feudalism the peasants gathered up a portion of all the food they had made, physically took it over to the landlords house, and under slavery a slave works all day harvesting cane, cotton or diamonds and then watches the slaver owner take away all of those goods without compensating them. In both of these modes of production it is clear that human labor is producing these goods and that it is the products of labor that are being appropriated by the dominant class.Under capitalism the process of exchange makes it harder to see the passing of surplus from exploited to exploiter, but it’s still there. Workers are still producing the entire social product and another class, this time the capitalist class, is taking the surplus from them, selling it back to them and getting rich off of it.The concept that the labor that goes into a commodity is the underlying essence of its value has been around for awhile. It even predates Marx, though he gave the theory new life. Economists going all the way back to Ben Franklin realized that this theory helped answer a perplexing question in economic theory: why do heterogeneous commodities exchange? By heterogeneous, I mean that commodities are really different from each other. They have different physical properties, different uses.

This we can say that the homogenization of labor time (or the “simplification” of labor) is not a quantifiable phenomena. We can observe it qualitatively as a tendency under capitalism but there really isn’t an objective way of measuring it.